But in the end, President Obama was right: "You don't muddle
through the central front on terror. . . . You don't
muddle through stamping out the Taliban."

And:

We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn't
worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult
choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was
also right a few months ago when he declared, "This will not be quick,
nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This
is a war of necessity. . . . This is fundamental to the
defense of our people."

It isn't often that right wing hacks cite Obama as a trustworthy
authority. But then it isn't often the case that Obama is so wrong.
Even so, I suspect some contextual distortion. After all, everything
else in Brooks's post is distorted. Walt provides more details on the
line that "counterinsurgency efforts that put population protection
at their core have succeeded nearly 70 percent of the time." Other
claims, like "Only 6 percent of Afghans want a Taliban return" would
be intrinsically suspect even if Brooks had cited a source; the
counter that "NATO is viewed with surprising favor" means what?
Seven percent would surprise me, unless the poll takers had a NATO
military escort, in which case even more surprising numbers are
possible. Polling means very little in Afghanistan because almost
no one has no reason not to tell the truth. I've rarely read a
piece so artful at distorting every reference. On the other hand,
every now and then you catch Brooks in an outright lie, like this
whopper:

Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict
against Islamic extremism.

Call him on this and he'll probably cite the 1979 revolution in
Iran which the US did oppose through various meaningless gestures.
But nothing else in the article refers to Iran, and the immediately
previous line refers to the Taliban, whose direct antecedents we
started financing and arming in . . . 1979. In fact,
the biggest recipient of US aid back then was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
currently second only to Mullah Omar as the most notorious Taliban
warlord operating today.

Still, Brooks' logic is even slippier, as when he writes:

This is a doctrine, as General McChrystal wrote in his remarkable
report, that puts population protection at the center of the
Afghanistan mission, that acknowledges that insurgencies can only be
defeated when local communities and military forces work together.

To put it concretely, this is a doctrine in which small groups of
American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in
remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping
to establish courts and building schools and roads.

That may be the doctrine, but how can you see this working? The
US military doesn't even build their own bases, much less schools
and roads. They haven't been able to provide security in relatively
safe Kabul, much less way out in the overwhelmingly rural country.
When they do go out, they're targets, which makes them defensive;
being heavily armed and so inclined, that makes them offensive as
well. It's hard to change the doctrine against basic training, or
against the reasons the soldiers volunteered in the first place.
The inescapable fact is that the US military simply doesn't have
the necessary skills to provide Afghans with government so popular
that the Taliban will give up their arms and rally around our flag.
That's not going to happen, less because the Taliban are a hard
sell (although they certainly are) than because we simply don't
have that kind of empathy and generosity in our veins.

Still, Brooks's "all in" or "all out" dichotomy is just another
of his straw man arguments meant to stack the deck. We could, for
instance, do what the Russians did in 1989, which is to take out
troops off the ground and out of the country but keep giving aid.
The Najibullah government, which is surely no more popular than
the Karzai government, held out against the Pakistan-supported
mujahideen for three years after that, and would have held out
longer had the Soviet Union not collapsed. One could also improve
those odds: by diplomatically keeping Pakistan and anyone else
from backing the Taliban; by leaving a thin umbrella of air power
in place which could stop aggressive Taliban formations but not
be used for supporting government aggression, much less backing
US or NATO troops; by providing reconstruction aid tied to the
Kabul government's track record of using it constructively. Most
of this is real simple: get rid of US/NATO troops and you get
rid of the stink of occupation; cut back the big money aid and
you cut back the waste through corruption; send a message that
the Afghans have to figure this out and make it happen on their
own, and suddenly cronyism doesn't pay. You need to get everyone
from Iran to India on board, which is a lot easier to do once US
troops are gone. I can think of minor ways to improve on this,
but there's really an advantage to letting the Afghans work it
out themselves.

On the other hand, if you have to do "all in" or "all out,"
the latter would be far better. Colin Powell may think that if
you corral a bull in a china shop the bull assumes responsibility
for everything he breaks, but Powell ain't much of a farmer, and
he sure don't know much about bulls. Most people understand that
the only viable course of action is to get the bull out of the
shop, alive or dead. The US is as much a creature of its size,
strength, brains and brawn as that bull is. Getting it out is
the minimal desire, but also a much more realistic one than it
is to hope the bull can turn into something else and repair its
damage.

The metaphor -- or should I say picture? -- holds up for some
more points as well. For one thing, what happens to the bull in
the china shop? May not get seriously hurt, but the sharp edges
of all that flying crystal are going to take their nicks. And
then there's the trauma of getting trapped. And assuming the bull
didn't really mean to simply destroy everything, the realization
has got to be a nasty psychic blow. The bull's likely to wind up
needing some serious counseling, but in America these days all
you get are drugs, lectures, and church. Then some politician
comes along and ships you off to another china shop and it starts
all over again. The US has been playing bad cop to the world for
a long time now, and getting worse and worse at it. And since
it's mostly to fight back against the blowback from the last
time we blew it, this has all turned into a death spiral. You
can argue both ways whether Afghans might be better off with
or without an American commitment, but one thing should be real
damn clear by now, and that's that America is worse off for
getting tied up in places like Afghanistan, no matter what the
provocation or reasoning.

Sometime in the 1940s US foreign policy got perverted. With
Europe's colonial regimes in ruins, the Soviet Union on a military
roll, anti-fascist and anti-colonialist resistance movements in
full flower all across Europe and Asia and possibly elsewhere,
and the US filthy rich compared to the rest of a broken world,
the US refashioned its foreign policy to represent not its own
people but the international capitalist class. That led to all
sorts of weird behavior, ranging from recruiting dictators to
liquidating our own working class. Along the way they've built
a self-perpetuating foreign policy establishment that makes it
impossible to public consider how perverse US policy has become.
When everyone from Brooks to Obama proclaim Afghanistan a "war
of necessity" they're really saying we don't want to talk about
how we managed to get ourselves into a fix where we know we have
to build roads and schools in the poorest country in the world,
but can't because nobody there wants the roads, schools, or for
that matter us. If we thought about this war for a moment we'd
realize what an utter waste it is, but then most wars are like
that.

Matthew Yglesias has another
take
on Brooks, focusing on the alleged risk to nuclear-armed Pakistan
of failing to stop the Taliban. No one -- properly discounting
warmongers like Brooks -- thinks the Taliban have any chance at
overthrowing or even significantly destabilizing Pakistan. The
risk is pushing Pakistan back into a box where they feel the need
to support the Taliban against their fear of an Indian proxy in
Afghanistan -- specifically, Hamid Karzai. That's what happened
in 2003-06 when Bush was asleep at the wheel, and that's a big
part of the reason the Taliban came back. There's a lot Americans
don't seem to be capable of understanding about this conflict,
but the weird psychological games between India and Pakistan are
surely near the top of the list.

Steve Coll: Ink Spots:
Compared to this piece, Brooks is even more delusional than you can
imagine. For starters, Coll points out that there is no "all in"
strategy. He gives a figure of 500,000 troops to implement an effort
to secure all of Afghanistan, and points out that even if Obama had
the will, the Army doesn't have that many usable troops. He also
points out that McChrystal's actual proposal is for a version of
the oft-cited, rarely successful "ink spot" strategy: secure a few
small ink spots on the map, build them up until they are stable,
then incrementally expand and link up those secure spots. In theory
you wind up covering the map. In practice is a messier story, but
as Coll points out, you don't have to extrapolate from models as
diverse as Vietnam: McChrystal's ink spot theory has already been
tried in Afghanistan, by the Soviets in 1986-92. The good news is
that it sort of worked, at least in terms of postponing collapse.
The bad news is that collapse still came, after the Soviet Union
itself collapsed and its Russian mafia heirs stopped helping at
all. Of course, the US wouldn't do that, except that the US did
just that to Afghanistan once before, and has treated all of its
other foreign policy failures -- North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran,
Iraq, Somalia, where else? -- with various combinations of spite
and disdain.

Paperback Links

In my recent
books
post, I noted several new paperback editions of books that I had
read over the last year, but hadn't managed to get my quotes/notes
pages together on. I've hustled a bit and finally gotten that done:

I didn't manage to add a lot of analysis or critique to these
notes. I've never been much for liberalism, which is one reason
I so appreciate Ali, but Frank, Galbraith, and Krugman make a
pretty solid case for it, and not just given the recent alternative.

Music Week

Mike & the Ravens: No Place for Pretty
(2009, Zoho Roots): Blues-rock group; played it twice and don't
remember anything other than that it's not bad.
B+(*)

No Jazz Prospecting

Well, I have a few things I could post, but not many: eight isn't
much of a week. I've also played a dozen or so records without taking
time to write down first impressions -- mostly things I couldn't so
easily dismiss, so they've gone straight to the replay pile. Also
don't have my mail bookkeeping done. It's not that I haven't been
working hard. Yesterday's Rhapsody post took a look at 34 records.
Also there will be a Recycled Goods out in a day or two. It's pretty
much done now except for an intro and some technical issues. A big
thing I've done there is to look at Verve's 118-deep "Originals"
reissue series. I got so carried away there I wound up splitting
it into two installments. Still don't have a new home for Recycled
Goods, so I'm sort of floating there. Don't have the clout to swing
such obvious targets as the Beatles reissue box(es), the Big Star
box, the Hip-O Select and Rhino Handmade completism, or dozens of
other things that seem worthy of comment.

The Jazz Consumer Guide game plan looks like this: one more
week of (possibly spotty) prospecting from the incoming queues,
then one or two weeks to finish off the draft. I have more than
enough material for that draft, so I'm mostly looking to round
off what I have, tie together some related packages, decide what
to do with the older entries, settle on two pick hits -- don't
have obvious choices yet, although Rova and Fully Celebrated
are the current front-runners -- and find some duds. Still have
house work to do, and need to travel a bit in the next two weeks,
so that may impact this one way or another. But I'd like to have
column done mid-October, hopefully to run sometime November.

Rhapsody Streamnotes

The Afghanistan Impasse

Ahmed Rashid: The Afghanistan Impasse.
I just read two books on Afghanistan, and was pleased to see this,
nominally a review of two more books that I had only dimly been
aware of and conveniently found in the library. Turns out it has
little to do with Nicholas Schmidle's To Live or to Perish
Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (Henry Holt) and
Gretchen Peters's Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling
the Taliban and al Qaeda (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's). I'll
thumb through those books later and let you know what I find.
Rashid is the venerable Pakistani journalist whose Taliban:
Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia is
the standard source on the rise of the Taliban, and whose 2008
book, Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation
Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia is the
best available book on what happened to the region since the
US got took an interest in late 2001. (See my
book page for
extensive quotes.) He is, in short, both a guy who knows what
he's talking about. However, he seems to have gotten too wound
up in his subject, which is turning him from a fine journalist
to a muddled pundit. Consider the following two paragraphs:

After Obama's injection of 21,000 troops and trainers, total
Western forces in Afghanistan now number 100,000, including 68,000 US
troops. It is likely that General McChrystal will soon ask for
more. Obama's overall plan has been to achieve security by doubling
the Afghan army's strength to 240,000 men and the police to 160,000;
but these are tasks that would take at least until 2014 to complete,
if indeed they can be carried out. Meanwhile the military operation in
Afghanistan is now costing cash-strapped US taxpayers $4 billion a
month.

Across the region many people fear that the US and NATO may start
to pull out of Afghanistan during the next twelve months despite their
uncompleted mission. That would almost certainly result in the Taliban
walking into Kabul. Al-Qaeda would be in a stronger position to launch
global terrorist attacks. The Pakistani Taliban would be able to
"liberate" large parts of Pakistan. The Taliban's game plan of waiting
out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever.

Pretty much everyone agrees that the security situation has
deteriorated progressively ever since winter 2001/2002 -- the time
period when Rory Stewart was able to walk across much of the country
(see The Places in Between
[book page].
This has happened in almost perfect correlation with the increase
of US and NATO troops, the "training" of "Afghan forces," and
the spending (or wasting) of vast sums of development money. The
two may not be causally linked, but it's clear that involvement
of the sort that the US has engaged in for eight years now has
had little benefit either to Afghanistan or to the US and now
seems to be returning less and less value. I'm convinced that
the problem is endemic both to Afghanistan and to the US, and
that the combination simply doesn't work. As polls indicate, a
majority of Americans (and a supermajority of Democrats) have
come to the same conclusion, even if they're unlikely to phrase
it my way. (Most are less tempted to blame the Americans than
the Afghans.) We're a nation that prides itself on good business
sense, and quite frankly any business that reviews returns like
these will quickly move to cut their losses. There may be some
room for debating how to do that, but it should be clear that
our best efforts have failed and that some sort of reduction is
clearly in order.

Rashid, however, has bought into the occupation to such an
extent that his second paragraph is full of doom alarms meant
to cower us. Although the Taliban can do damage in Afghanistan,
there is no reason to think they could take over Kabul without
significant foreign support, which is very unlikely. Similar
predictions were made when the Soviets withdrew, but the rump
government held its positions against US- and Pakistani-funded
mujahideen for three years, until the Soviet Union collapsed
and ended all aid. The notion that Pakistan would fall to the
Taliban is even more far fetched. Pakistan may tolerate the
Taliban in the small and marginal (to it) FATA, but Pakistan's
military easily routed the Taliban in the Swat Valley. No one
thinks the Taliban has any prospects beyond the Pashtun belt,
which as Pakistan goes is thin and marginal.

One thing that's happened in the last year is that the
honeymoon between Pakistan and the Taliban is finally over.
It's hard to see either side putting that relationship back
together again. Pakistan has a problem with India, but the
solution there is diplomatic. That is something the US can
and should work on. Afghanistan has a lot of problems, and
no easy solutions. Most of all they need to develop a viable
state and a viable economy. I doubt that either has ever
happened under foreign occupation. They certainly haven't
happened while there was a major insurrection against foreign
occupation. The US and NATO need to reduce their footprint
and chokehold considerably, preferably completely. Aid needs
to be managed better -- now it's mostly soaked up in graft,
doing virtually no one any good. There are plenty of smarter
ways to do this, but the one thing we know will be disastrous
would be to keep pumping troops in until we grind the Afghans
into submission. We don't have the troops, time, or money,
and the human toll on the ground would be devastating.

Rashid's threats turn out to be the same threats that Gen.
McChrystal made in his leaked report about what would happen
if he didn't get his extra 40,000 troops. Such threats play
on the ignorance of politicians, who can easily imagine them
being turned into told-you-so's if they don't cover their ass
and go along. In other words, they're bully bluffs. The real
question to ask McChrystal is what difference 40,000 troops
would make. The obvious answer is that they'll provide the
Taliban with more targets, so more American troops will get
killed and maimed; and they'll kill a few more Taliban and
a lot more ordinary Afghans, as well as turn more of the
latter into Taliban. In other words, they will perpetuate
the violence, which is really the last thing we should want.

Rashid writes a bit about the elections. One thing I have
to say about this is that it would have been good for Karzai
to have lost -- not because he's corrupt or inept or whatever,
but because it would have shown Afghans that it is possible
to change leaders without using bullets. That would have been
a good lesson to learn. It would even give the Taliban reason
to run for office rather than try to shoot their way in.

Here's something to carry away with you: Life is invariably hard
when you set up your massive embassies, your regional command centers,
your election advisors, your private security guards, your military
trainers and advisors, your diplomats and civilian enablers and then
try to come up with a formula for motivating the locals to do your
bidding.

The way to level the field between "our Afghans" and "their Afghans"
is to bring the US troops home. Then all each will have to fight for
is their own freedom from control by other Afghans -- where the Taliban
have a pretty nasty track record, as do the warlords in different ways.
They can pick their poison, or compromise. But now the choice is between
fighting for or against us, which isn't a choice that favors us.

Tom Engelhardt: How to Trap a President in a Losing War:
On the McChrystal memo. Sees Petraeus behind it, "the most political
general to come down the pike since, in 1951 in the midst of the Korean
War, General Douglas MacArthur said his goodbyes to Congress after being
cashiered by President Truman for insubordination -- for, in effect,
wanting to run his own war and the foreign policy that went with it."
Also makes frequent reference to "the Surgettes": the pundits who,
having got lucky in Iraq, now see surges as the answers to each and
every military failure. The Surge worked in Iraq because it was
preceded by a series of deals that were the real cause for the
reduction in violence. (By the way, the drop was masked for nearly
a by the additional violence the extra troops brought with them.
The reduction only became evident when the troops were throttled
to keep the whole strategem from failing.) For lots of reasons the
same strategy cannot work in Afghanistan.

Helene Cooper: GOP Support May Be Vital to Obama on Afghan War.
A good reason to think about whether he really wants to fight to
keep the Afghan war going. One big reason why Clinton lost his
health care reform program in 1993-94 was that he pushed NAFTA
out ahead of it. He passed NAFTA, but only with Republican support,
while crippling the union efforts he needed for health care. Why
didn't he make NAFTA contingent on getting health care passed?
Why not make Afghanistan contingent on health care reform now?
It's not like the Republicans are cutting him any slack for being
out front with in their war -- and really, all wars benefit the
Republicans because they burn tax money and distract from reform
at home. Not that the political calculus is what you want to base
your Afghanistan policy on. But it's safe to say the Republicans
do just that, and if they see a way to burn Obama they'll do it.

I read two books on Afghanistan last week, collecting extensive
notes on them.

Gregory Feifer's The Great Gamble covers the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-89, with a bit on the Najibullah
regime that remained in power until 1992. It's drawn mostly from
the personal stories of Soviet soldiers, with a fairly brief
summary of the high-level politics in the Kremlin. The decision
to "invade" seems to have been made almost accidentally, like
the Politburo was trying to follow procedures for 1956 Hungary
and 1967 Czechoslovakia but couldn't remember the details and
were too embarrassed to look them up or test whether they were
relevant to Afghanistan. They weren't. The Soviets had installed
communist regimes in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and owned them
lock, stock and barrel. Moreover, they were lined up behind an
Iron Curtain where NATO threatened the Soviet Union on one side,
but where the Soviet Union was free to act on the other. The
communist government in Afghanistan was the result of a local
coup -- and was riven by factions (Khalq and Parcham) actively
involved in killing each other off. The Kabul government had
very little control over the countryside -- in fact, less and
less every day. The only thing the Soviets actually decided was
to dive in and kill off the Parcham leader, Hafizullah Amin
(who had recently killed off the Khalq leader, Mohammed Taraki).
The troops were sent in to back up the assassination, having
already failed once so ineptly that Amin was unawares. Soviet
invasion instantly undermined the Kabul government, rather than
fortifying it, leaving the invaders with an utter mess. From
there on, well, you know the drill: stay the course, we can't
afford to lose, giving up would invite disaster, blah blah blah.
The Soviet Union had declined miserably by the 1980s, such that
the soldiers were ill-equipped and ill-supported. They provisioned
themselves by looting, and defended themselves by indiscriminate
slaughter. The US, China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia poured
billions of dollars in weapons to prop up mujahideen warlords,
who barely made a dent against the Soviet war machine, but did
incredible damage to Afghanistan. The Soviet Union lost fewer
than 15,000 soldiers in the war (although the injuries and trauma
were far greater). More than a million Afghans died, and seven
million were displaced. In other words, the Americans (primarily
the Reagan administration) cheerfully sacrificed 70 Afghans for
every Soviet they killed. They utterly destroyed the Afghan state
and economy, and they prevented a whole generation of Afghans from
learning and developing normal skills, while training a generation
of murderers and thieves. The result was civil war that continues
to this day, exemplified by the Taliban rule in the late 1990s,
one of the most barbarous and incompetent regimes since WWII.
Nor were the scars restricted to Afghanistan. Returning Soviet
soldiers turned into violent criminals, which practically became
the norm in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Mujahideen
warlords Reagan praised as like our founding fathers took jihad
on the road, leading to scores of terrorist atrocities from Bali
to the World Trade Center in New York. And after 2001, the
Americans returned to wreak even more havoc in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and elsewhere, becoming not only the world's superpower
but its most dangerous rogue nation.

Jones is a RAND Corp. political scientist, based in Washington
DC. His resume includes visiting Afghanistan "over a dozen times
since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." His book promises
to be the first comprehensive history of the first 7 years of the
US occupation of Afghanistan. It's fairly spotty in that regard:
neither a military history nor a political history; despite a few
first-person stories, not what you'd call journalism either. He
throws in a few pages on Alexander and Tamerlane and Babur and
Rudyard Kipling, but he doesn't offer much depth. He does offer
some sociological concepts, and sketches out a comparative set of
insurgency studies. And he winds up with a few prescriptions that
never once call into question the premises of the problem. In a
nutshell, this is what passes for analytical thinking in DC these
days. Lord help us.

At the end of Jones' book, he makes a set of recommendations
for turning the war around. He argues that at least some Americans
have always understood Afghanistan (ambassadors Zalmay Khalilzad
and Ronald Neumann are his examples) and that the problems were
caused by political leaders who didn't listen to good advise (no
names, but I know a Bush when I smell one). Then he blames the
insurgency on "too little outside support for the Afghan government
and too much support for insurgents." That led me to comment:

There's no evidence, in this book at least, that either Khalilzad's
adolescence of Neumann's sheep hunting adventure in any way offered
any profound insights into the problems poised by Afghanistan. They,
at best, were slightly less ignorant and slightly less indifferent
than the usual run of Americans driven by the Global War on Terror
into Afghanistan. The fact is that Afghanistan was never more than
an accident in the minds of American politicians and warriors who
had their minds on something else: on humiliating the Russians back
in 1979 and on reasserting US global dominance in 2001. The original
sin was back in 1979 when Carter and Brzezinski put the whole Afghan
people at risk to further their puerile Cold War fantasies. Pause a
moment on that: if Jimmy Carter cared so little about what would
happen to Afghanistan, what hope can you invest in the brains and
moral character of Reagan, Clinton, and two generations of Bush?

It's easy to argue that an insurgency arose in Afghanistan because
the post-2001 state was weak, but when has Afghanistan ever had an
effective system of government? Certainly not under Zahir Shah, when
Afghanistan was still at peace. Most likely never. The Soviets can
be blamed for meddling if not in the 1978 Revolution, which seems to
have been a bit of mischief endemic to the weak government's elite
institutions, then in trying to sort out the Khalq-Parcham factional
strife of the pro-communist ruling party. But it was first Pakistan
then the US that tore Afghanistan apart with their "better dead than
red" obsession. The Soviets' real crime was blundering into the trap
the US had set. They did this because they didn't understand a couple
of very basic things: first was that neither communist faction had
any popular support; second was that whoever controls the state in
Afghanistan controls nothing of effective value; third is that the
only thing that really gets Afghans riled up is the presence of a
foreign army on their soil. From 1979 on, Afghanistan has been riven
by civil war, which has largely been sponsored by foreign interests,
each concerned with the other, none caring the least bit about what
happens to the Afghans.

The only important thing that changed between 1979 and 2001 was
that during the intervening 22 years (now 30 years) the only skill
worth an Afghan's effort to develop was fighting war. The result
is that the political class in Afghanistan has been rigorously
selected for the sole trait of self-interested preservation in
times of war. Back in 1979 Afghanistan had virtually no skills
for state-building. Two decades later the state was run by the
Taliban, probably the most incompetent bureaucrats of the last
century. (I suppose you could argue that the Belgian legacy in
the Congo that led to Mobuto was in the running, but I doubt that
it comes close. Aside from the Taliban's warped-but-real system
of justice, every other normal function of government, to the
extent that it was implemented at all, was left to the charity
of foreign NGOs.) So along comes Bush and Rumsfeld, who really
don't have the slightest clue why America functions better than
other oligarchies like Haiti, and they're dumbfounded to find
themselves in a country where nobody knows how to do anything,
except fight. That's pretty hopeless under any circumstances,
but what makes it even worse is that all Bush and Rumsfeld ever
wanted in the first place was to fight -- fighting is why the
US invaded in the first place.

So when the author complains about the government getting too
little support and the insurgency getting too much support he's
trying to balance totally different things on the same scale. The
fact is that the insurgency got peanuts compared to what was spent
on the government and the war effort. I mean, who paid for the
Taliban? A few tribal leaders in the poorest part of Pakistan,
some mid-level ISI operatives, the mythical financiers of the
Gulf sheikdoms, some drug runners. They must have been outspent
a thousand-to-one, but in Afghanistan you can buy a lot of killing
awful cheap, and you can hardly buy honest government at all --
especially when you're laundering so much of the money back to
outfits like DynCorp, which is, after all, the Bush way.

So to say the debacle wasn't inevitable is to buy into a lot
of wishful thinking that has no business in Afghanistan.

He then proposed to fix this by building up a non-corrupt
government, working more with local institutions than with
national ones, and persuading Pakistan to shut down the safe
havens the Taliban are using in Pakistani territory. For
comments on those, follow the link above.

Books: Catching Up Again

Tried to collect the more timely, more pointedly political items
this time, after dumping most of my lesser-interest titles yesterday.
Part of this involved doing more research, so the well is still
pretty full. Could even do a third part, but will probably wait
a while, since this is chewing up a lot of time I don't really
have available. I couldn't resist picking up the Maass book below,
something I hope to get to soon.

Matthew Alexander/John Bruning: How to Break a Terrorist:
The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down
the Deadliest Man in Iraq (2008, Free Press): Alexander
is evidently a pseudonym for an Air Force interrogator who worked
on the intelligence that caught up with Zarqawi. Reviews claim
this reads like a thriller, but the key point is that it works
as an indictment of Cheney's torture methods.

Tariq Ali: The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom: And Other
Essays (2009, Verso): Title essay takes off from a Proust
quote: if Zionism seeks a biblical homeland for the Jews on the basis
of persecution, why not also look for a biblical homeland for gays
and lesbians? More pieces on literature and politics.

Glenn Beck: Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds
and Big Government (2009, Threshold Editions): I thumbed
through this incoherent comic book last night, finding it virtually
impossible to read. Back cover is covered with critical attacks on
Beck, mostly pegging him as a vile moron. It says something about
his niche marketing that he figures they're good for sales. Looks
like his readers are the idiots, and the point of argument is to
work up fury. Haven't looked at his other new bestseller, Glenn
Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government,
Inspired by Thomas Paine, let alone such earlier efforts as
America's March to Socialism: Why We're One Step Closer to
Giant Missile Parades.

Wendell Berry: Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and
Food (2009, Counterpoint): A collection of old essays from
over 30 years, with a new introduction by Michael Pollan. Probably
leans more toward farming, which is Berry's passion.

Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement
That Shattered the Party (2009, Nation Books): Attempts to
show that the movers and shakers of the Republican right wing are
scum at a personal level, as well as ignorant and vile politically.
Came up with enough examples to write 416 pages. Given how the
post-Bush right has broken down, he may be right.

Harold H Bruff: Bad Advice: Bush's Lawyers in the War on
Terror (2009, University Press of Kansas): That's putting
it, uh, thoughtfully. John Yoo's book title, War By Other Means:
An Insider's Account of the War on Terror, suggests that he
wasn't even trying to be a lawyer. David Addington was always a
guy who wrapped the law around his politics. Bush had no training
in law: the only point he grasped was that as long as you could
get away with it the law didn't apply. He hired lawyers to defend
that insight. But then he also thought the only point of democracy
was winning.

Paul Davidson: The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global
Economic Prosperity (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): A short
book of economic policy prescription, based on the immemorial
question, what would John Maynard Keynes say now?

John Diamond: The CIA and the Culture of Failure: US
Intelligence from the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of
Iraq (2008, Stanford Security Studies): Another book
on the CIA's uncanny ability to screw up everything it touches.
I've recently read Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: A History
of the CIA, which dishes the dirt from the beginning. This
starts with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and covers the
rudderless years in more detail.

Richard J Evans: The Third Reich at War (2009, Penguin
Press): Third volume following The Coming of the Third Reich
and The Third Reich in Power, presumably the end of a trilogy,
unless he wants to do a The Third Reich in Myth and History,
which would itself be interesting, but a change of pace. Long (944
pages), stuff that's been covered a lot -- and continues to be; cf.
Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe.
Don't know how good they are. I bought the first on a whim, thinking
it might be interesting to note parallels between the emergent Nazis
and the Bush fascists, but never actually got to the book.

Bradley Graham: By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes,
and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (2009, Public Affairs):
Big (832 pp), more than I want to know about him, plenty of room for
his many idiosyncrasies to get so annoying you lose track of how he
fit into the military-industrial complex as well as how he wrecked
it.

Alan Hart: Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume One:
The False Messiah (paperback, 2009, Clarity Press): One
should be able to make a strong case for the title. Evidently a
second volume is planned.

Godfrey Hodgson: The Myth of American Exceptionalism
(2009, Yale University Press): One of those ideas that keeps popping
up no matter how many times you try to kill it. Not necessarily a good
thing either. One Amazon review points out: "In the last third of the
book, Hodgson details the areas where America truly is exceptional
among industrial nations: last in health care, near last in educational
achievement, first in incarceration rates, first in violent crime, last
in intercity train service and public transit, first in income inequality,
first in the amount spent on the military, first in allowing lobbyists
and money to influence the democratic process." Probably helps that
Hodgson is British. He's written a number of books on the US, including
The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Movement
in America.

David E Hoffman: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold
War Arms Race & Its Dangerous Legacy (2009, Doubleday):
Looks like a major book, based on research on both sides of the Cold
War divide. Early on, at least some US military planners saw the arms
race as a way to bankrupt the Soviet Union. That led to ever more
fanciful schemes, which still possess the "best and brightest" minds
of the Pentagon. That arms race almost immediately led to scenarios
of apocalyptic destruction. It also caused a persistent unraveling
of America's sense of democracy, a moral rot that time and again
sided us with despotic regimes in a desperate totalitarian pursuit
of gamesmanship. If this book doesn't spell all that out, it should.

Susan Jacoby: Alger Hiss and the Battle for History
(2009, Yale University Press): After writing such sweeping books as
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age
of American Unreason, here's one short and specific, part of a
series, "Icons of America." Hiss is, well, iconic because people
read more into him than there ever was -- something that I must say
I never understood. I can, for instance, recall Nixon ranting that
the real reason liberals opposed him on Vietnam was that they could
never forgive him for what he did to Hiss, as if a couple million
dead in Vietnam and Cambodia mattered less than the fate of an Ivy
League commie. That's the sort of exaggeration Jacoby gets to work
with -- if only anyone cares anymore.

Dahr Jamail: The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to
Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (2009, Haymarket): Another
scoop for a freelance reporter who went further and dug deeper
into the Iraq war than just about anyone else. Forward by Chris
Hedges.

Seth G Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War
in Afghanistan (2009, WW Norton): RAND Corp. analyst looks
back, second guesses, offers some more guesses. [PS: After reading
this book, note seems about right.]

Anne Karpf/Brian Klug/Jacqueline Rose/Barbara Rosenbaum, eds.:
A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism
and Jewish Identity (paperback, 2008, Verso): Pieces from
a British group called Independent Jewish Voices.

Ichiro Kawachi/Bruce P Kennedy: The Health of Nations: Why
Inequality is Harmful to Your Health (paperback, 2006, New
Press): Linked from Richard Wilkinson's The Impact of Inequality:
How to Make Sick Societies Healthier, this seems to be even more
specifically focused on health care. As you know, the US has worse
health outcomes than any other rich country despite spending twice
or more as much per capita. Lots of reasons are possible, including
that overtreatment isn't necessarily a good thing, but inequality
seems to have far more to do with it: both in the denial of essential
services and in the jealous protectionism of those who think they're
better off for it.

Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat
Tillman (2009, Doubleday): I've probably read all of
Krakauer's books -- mountain climbing is one of my odder side
interests, and Mormonism is another -- still this doesn't seem
like a very promising combination. The only lesson I draw from
Tillman is the utter waste of America's war in Afghanistan, and
more generally America's passion for war. People are tempted
to think that Tillman did something remarkable leaving the NFL
for Afghanistan, but the two are so foolishly intertwined that
it was merely pathetic.

Mark LeVine: Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989
(2009, Zed): The years in question start with the Intifada, follow
through the Oslo accords and the revival of Israel's rejectionist
right under Ariel Sharon. The Intifada marked a shift in how Israel
saw its Palestinian problem: before it was external, led by the PLO,
characterized by terrorism; after, it was homegrown, an indictment
of Israeli occupation. Short book has a lot of ground to cover.

William A Link: Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise
of Modern Conservatism (2008, St Martin's Press): Obviously
way too sympathetic, which in this case makes you question the whole
project. A better title would have been Blustering Bigot.

Peter Maass: Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil
(2009, Knopf): There is no doubt but that the world is going to run
out of oil sooner or later. The world economy grew almost linearly
with the extraction of oil, so its decline seems inevitable as well.
This can happen more or less violently, but if the oil industry
itself is any indication, the future looks pretty bleak.

Michelle Malkin: Culture of Corruption: Obama and His
Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (2009, Regnery
Press): Chart-topping bestseller, which raises the question: why
didn't anyone use this title when Bush was president? I mean,
other than that it would have been impossible to squeeze it all
into 256 pages. I especially love the bit about Michelle Obama
and Joe Biden being "nepotism beneficiaries."

David N Myers: Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of
Simon Rawidowicz (2008, Brandeis): Rawidowicz died in 1957,
having established himself as a notable scholar and written some
essays critical of the Zionists' failure to protect Arabs during
the 1947-49 war, a source not only of future conflict but of the
deep-seated moral crisis within Zionism.

Shuja Nawaz: Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the
Wars Within (2008, Oxford University Press): Looking back
at the Musharraf years, it seems pretty obvious now that the Bush
administration understood virtually nothing about Pakistan's army
and its view of the state and the world. This big (600 pp) book
comes late but might help, especially since it's not clear that
Obama gets it either.

David Neiwert: The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized
the American Right (paperback, 2009, Polipoint Press): Takes
on the tendency in the right to seek the elimination of their enemies,
as opposed to any of the wussier approaches favored by liberals, like
trying to argue a case on points. Covers the obvious suspects, with
Lou Dobbs mixed in with the neo-fascists.

Trevor Paglen: Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography
of the Pentagon's Secret World (2009, Dutton): Author is
described as "a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur."
Book attempts to expose a number of DOD and CIA "black ops" sites,
helping you to get some notion of the bizarre things the security
state is up to. Previously wrote: Torture Taxi: On the Trail of
the CIA's Rendition Flights. A similar book is Harry Helms:
Top Secret Tourism: Your Travel Guide to Germ Warfare Laboratories,
Clandestine Aircraft Bases and Other Places in the United States You're
Not Supposed to Know About.

Charles P Pierce: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a
Virtue in the Land of the Free (2009, Doubleday): Inspired
by the Terry Schiavo case and the Creation Museum, which are as
good as anywhere to start, but pretty low-lying fruit. I'm still
ambivalent about the Dark Ages scenario -- there seems to be a
lot of pull in both directions -- and would like to go beyond the
mere cataloguing of contemporary stupidity. So the key question
here is "how" this happened. Part of it is certainly that stupidity
has been in the political interests of the right, but it's also
been accommodated by politicians of the not-so-right. Businesses
too. Where does that leave us?

Nomi Prins: It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts,
Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street
(2009, Wiley): Former Goldman Sachs managing director turned
muckraking journalist, argues that the pillage had less to do
with subprime mortgages than "a financial system that rewards
people who move money instead of people who make things, operates
outside of the media's gaze, is sheltered from governmental
supervision, and uses leverage to turn risky deals into insanely
risky deals." Seems about right. Previously wrote Other People's
Money: The Corporate Mugging of America and Jacked: How
"Conservatives" Are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for
Them or Not).

TR Reid: The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better,
Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (2009, Penguin Press): A
comparative study of health care systems around the world, perhaps
the easiest way to show how skewed, deranged, and wrong-minded the
US "system" is. Previously wrote The United States of Europe.

Donald E Schmidt: The Folly of War: America's Foreign
Policy, 1895-2005 (paperback, 2005, Algora): Traces
America's war tendencies to the militant idealism of Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson along with a belief in American
Exceptionalism.

James Scott: The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story
of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a US Spy Ship (2009,
Simon & Schuster): An old story which has generally been kept
under wraps. Much smaller events have been blown up into excuses
for war, but Israel wasn't a country we were keen on tangling
with. So why did it happen? And why didn't it matter? And is
the appearance of a new book on the subject an indication that
we're having second thoughts about unconditional support for a
country that sometimes treats us as badly as they treat everyone
else?

Robert Skidelsky: Keynes: The Return of the Master
(2009, Public Affairs): Keynes biographer, his multi-volume series
reissued abridged in 2005 to a mere 1056 pages. This reminder comes
in at 240 pages. It seems to me that Keynes' disappearance has been
greatly exaggerated, but there's nothing like a huge worldwide
financial crisis to bring people back to the essential books. Also
see: Peter Clarke: Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the
20th Century's Most Influential Economist.

Rebecca Solnit: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary
Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009, Viking): Looks at
how natural and manmade disasters break the run of everyday life and
trigger community-building: various earthquakes, Katrina, etc.

David Swanson: Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency
and Forming a More Perfect Union (paperback, 2009, Seven
Stories Press): Law and order guy, thinks Bush and Cheney and
various accomplices should stand trial for their numerous crimes.
Makes a good case, I'm sure.

Sam Tanenhaus: The Death of Conservatism (2009,
Random House): An acolyte/biographer of Whitaker Chambers, he
tries to defend his conservative idealism from reality by arguing
that real conservatism died and has been replaced by an impostor.
I doubt that he identifies the impostor as fascism, but someone
acould write such a book.

Nicholas Thompson: The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze,
George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (2009,
Henry Holt): The contrast is one way to look at the Cold War,
but Kennan went through his hawkish phase too, and he's far
better remembered for his "long telegram" rant than for all
the reservations and caveats he offered later.

Marcy Wheeler: Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration
Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy (paperback,
2007, Vaster Books): A short brief on two interrelated subjects,
tied together by the media that abets them. The Iraq propaganda
story has been covered at great length elsewhere; the Valerie
Plame outing less so.

Richard Wilkinson: The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick
Societies Healthier (paperback, 2006, New Press): Ran across
this because Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have a new book coming out in
December (already out in UK) called The Spirit Level: Why Greater
Equality Makes Societies Stronger. The focus strikes me as right:
inequality poisons personal relationships in ways both subtle and
profound, and those redound throughout society. Conversely, social
cohesion depends on the fundamental sense that we're all basically
alike, and therefore we're all in this together.

Richard Wolffe: Renegade: The Making of a President
(2009, Crown): The most conspicuous (at least in bookstores right
now) of a pile of quickie books on Obama's election win. Others
include: Gwin Ifill: The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the
Age of Obama; David Plouffe: The Audacity to Win: The Inside
Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory; Larry J
Sabato: The Year of Obama: How Barack Obama Won the White House;
Chuck Todd: How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the
Historic 2008 Presidential Election; Greg Mitchell: Why Obama
Won: The Making of a President 2008; Evan Thomas: "A Long
Time Coming": The Inspiring, Combative 2008 Campaign and the Historic
Election of Barack Obama.

Previously mentioned books new in paperback (book pages noted where
available; some are stubs or have brief notes without quotes; eventually
all will have quotes and comments):

Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American
Power (2008; paperback, 2009, Scribner): A personal, rather
idiosyncratic history of Pakistan willingly but not necessarily all
that constructively under America's imperial thumb.
[book page: note]

Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined
Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation
(2008; paperback, 2009, Holt): A pretty accurate summary of the
Republicans' run of ruin in Washington. Paperback added something
to the subtitle; not sure if the book has been updated.
[book page: stub]

James K Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives
Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008;
paperback, 2009, Free Press): Give corporations the keys to the
state and they'll turn it into a system for preying on people,
the exact opposite of what a democratic state should do. One of
the better political books to appear in the last couple of years.
I need to go back and pick up my quotes.
[book page: stub]

Paul Krugman: The Conscience of a Liberal (2007;
paperback, 2009, WW Norton): Part political manifesto, but cooly
delivered because he wants to work a macro view of US history in,
from the Long Gilded Age through the New Deal-inspired levelling
and back to a return of Gilded Age inequality.
[book page]

Paul Krugman: The Return of Depression Economics and the
Crisis of 2008 (2008; paperback, 2009, WW Norton): Revised
a year ago from the 1999 original, written then in response to the
East Asian collapse of 1997, which bears many of the same traits
as the current boom/bust.
[book page: note]

Ahmed Rashid: Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure
of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia
(2008; paperback, 2009, Penguin): Probably the single best book out
on America's post-2001 Af-Pak fiasco, although it still leaves plenty
of questions unanswered and even unraised.
[book page]

Books: Catching Up

I have enough book notes piled up that I'm going to do two posts
in quick succession to clean up the excess -- second part will most
likely appear tomorrow. When I do these things I usually pick the
most urgent and important titles from my accumulated notes, but this
time my plan is to save those for tomorrow and clear out as much of
the old stuff I've been skipping over as possible. So skim lightly,
but these are books I thought had some interest. I've adopted the
convention of limiting these posts to 40 books each, but this one
runs a little long. Otherwise I'd wind up doing this again.

Daniel J Barrett: MediaWiki (Wikipedia and Beyond)
(paperback, 2008, O'Reilly): Large book on the free software package
that underlies Wikipedia. I've been meaning to use MediaWiki for a
couple of projects, so this is of special interest to me. On the
other hand, I've been accumulating books on Wikipedia without yet
getting to the point of using them. Won't have a real opinion on
them until I do.

Robert H Bates: When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in
Late-Century Africa (paperback, 2008, Cambridge University
Press): Failed states consume economies in chaos, corruption, and
predation, but what causes states to fail? One suggestion here is
that globalization, especially backed by IMF policies, undermined
efforts to build stable, adequately financed state organizations.

Derek Bickerton: Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist
Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages
(paperback, 2009, Hill and Wang): A book about creoles and pidgins,
part memoir of a lifetime's study.

David Blumenthal/James Morone: The Heart of Power: Health
and Politics in the Oval Office (2009, University of California
Press): New history of the politics of health care policy.

Paul Buhle, ed: The Beats: A Graphic History
(2009, Hill and Wang): Text by Harvey Pekar and others; art by
Ed Piskor and others. Not sure who all the others are. Short,
celebratory, maybe a little critical when it comes to sexism.
Stuff I used to care a lot about, not just when I read Ginsberg
and Ferlinghetti but also when I followed Buhle's comics jones
in Radical America.

Kathleen Burk: Old World, New World: Great Britain and
America from the Beginning (2008, Atlantic Monthly Press):
Big book (848 pages), tries to straddle the Atlantic from 1497
on.

Lisa Chamberlain: Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age
of Creative Destruction (2008, Da Capo Press): Portrait
of Gen X (those born in the mid-1960s through '70s) as pioneering
entrepreneurs; one review tags this "gushing, anecdotal" -- not
very useful attributes.

Mike Chinoy: Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean
Nuclear Crisis (2008, St Martin's Press): Author is an ex-CNN
reporter, which doesn't really make this an "inside" account -- but
then you really wouldn't want to read a book on this by the likes of
John Bolton.

Gregory Cochran/Henry Harpending: The 10,000 Year Explosion:
How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009, Basic
Books): Argues for genetic evolution within the last 10,000 years,
contrary to the more common expectation of genetic stability in
large populations.

Jennet Conant: The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British
Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (2008, Simon & Schuster):
Third book by Conant as she digs around WWII for interesting stories.
I'm not much for spy stories, but the other two books looked like
they might be interesting: Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and
the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
and 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los
Alamos.

Philip J Cunningham: Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student
Uprising of 1989 (2009, Rowman & Littlefield): Evidently
the author was there, was friends with various protesters, and kept a
day-by-day account of the events. Seems a little dated for that kind
of detail, but maybe not.

Michael C Desch: Power and Military Effectiveness: The
Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism (2008, Johns Hopkins
University Press): Dissects the argument, going back to 1815,
that Democratic states are inherently more likely to prevail in
wars.

Bart D Ehrman: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden
Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them)
(2009, Harper One): Basic historical deconstruction of the New
Testament -- the outline I've seen is mostly stuff I know about,
but probably not at this detail. Evidently, Ehrman has been doing
this for a while now. Previous books include: The Orthodox
Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological
Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (1996);
Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It Into the New
Testament (2003); Lost Christianities: The Battles for
Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (2003); Misquoting
Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005);
The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and
Betrayed (2006).

Jon Entine: Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the
DNA of the Chosen People (2007, Grand Central Publishing):
Research into the genetic angle of Jewish history, a subject more
succinctly covered in David B Goldstein: Jacob's Legacy: A
Genetic View of Jewish History (2008, Yale University Press).
This may be one of the few areas where anyone's still talking
about races, but then Entine, who draws a paycheck at American
Enterprise Institute, previously wrote: Taboo: Why Black
Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It.

Randy Charles Epping: The 21st Century Economy: A Beginner's
Guide (paperback, 2009, Vintage): Author of the very similar
A Beginner's Guide to the World Economy, originally dating
from 1992, with a 1995 revised edition and a 2001 reprint. Most
likely this title is basically another revision. Elementary, of
course.

Douglas Farah/Stephen Braun: Merchant of Death: Money, Guns,
Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible (paperback, 2008,
Wiley): Exposé of Russian arms dealer Victor Bout. Certainly not the
only one, and a piker compared to the US Government.

Stephen Fender: 50 Facts That Should Change The USA
(paperback, 2008, The Disinformation Company): A sequel to Jessica
Williams: 50 Facts That Should Change the World, reissued
in 2007 in a 2.0 Edition. The emphasis is on facts that are
non-obvious, counterintuitive even, but Americans are so ignorant --
one, or maybe several, of the facts -- that that isn't too hard.

Ann Finkbeiner: The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's
Postwar Elite (2006, Viking; paperback, 2007, Penguin): A
history of elite scientists consulting with the Defense Department,
especially after the Sputnik craze in 1958.

Leonard M Fleck: Just Caring: Health Care Rationing and
Democracy (2009, Oxford University Press): Takes rationing
as a serious ethical issue, insisting that "no one has a moral right
to impose rationing decisions on others if they are unwilling to
impose those same rationing decisions on themselves in the same
medical circumstances."

Tom Gjelten: Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography
of a Cause (2008, Viking): A portrait of the rum barons as
benevolent capitalists in the old Cuba, cast by Castro out of their
country to exile in Miami, whereupon they started financing the good
fight against the bad revolution.

Adrian Goldsworthy: How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower
(2009, Yale University Press): A venerable topic, of course, always
more so when one's own sense of superpowership is well nigh keeling
over.

Adam Gopnik: Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin,
Lincoln, and Modern Life (2009, Knopf): Coincidentally,
both Lincoln and Darwin were born on 12 February 1809, the first
link in this attempt to draw both in to a common narrative of
19th century progress.

Colin Gordon: Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate
of the American City (paperback, 2009, University of
Pennsylvania Press): Having lived in St. Louis, I can certainly
buy it as a case example for urban decline.

Ronnie Greene: Night Fire: Big Oil, Poison Air, and Margie
Richard's Fight to Save Her Town (2008, Amistad): The town
is Norco, LA, located in what's variously called Chemical Corridor
and/or Cancer Alley. The poison air comes from Shell Oil, one of
the real big ones. Greene's a Miami Herald reporter, who
gets to report for once.

Stephen P Halbrook: The Founders' Second Amendment: Origins
of the Right to Bear Arms (2008, Ivan R Dee): Fundamental
research into the why and wherefore of the second amendment. Argues
that an individual right was seen as a way to check the abusive
power of a standing army. Author previously wrote The Swiss and
the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the
Third Reich, which is probably another brief in favor of broad
gun ownership.

Harry Helms: Top Secret Tourism: Your Travel Guide to Germ
Warfare Laboratories, Clandestine Aircraft Bases and Other Places
in the United States You're Not Supposed to Know About
(paperback, 2007, Feral House): Not much of a travel guide, and
evidently not all that complete -- e.g., no Fort Detrick, the
evident source of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, at the very
least enabled by your tax dollars.

Tom Holland: The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the
Epic Rise of the West (2009, Doubleday): A history of Europe's
1K crisis -- the apocalyptic expectations surrounding the year 1000.
Don't know how far this goes, but it certainly sets the stage for the
Crusades beginning in 1095. Holland has written a couple of books on
earlier history: Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
and Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the
West. I found Rubicon to be a very useful introduction to
a subject I knew little of.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, ed: Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises
of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future
(2009, Random House Canada): Smart guy, likes big questions with
a lot of weight on the future. This is one of those questions,
but he's just editing, pulling together six Canadian experts,
including William Marsden, author of a title worth repeating:
Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental
Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care).

Brooks Jackson/Kathleen Hall Jamieson: unSpun: Finding Facts
in a World of Disinformation (paperback, 2007, Random House):
Tough job for a short (208 pp) book, more likely to drown in examples
than draw lessons beyond the usual don't believe most (or damn near
anything) that you hear. Focuses on politics and advertising, pretty
low lying fruit.

Flora Jessop/Paul T Brown: Church of Lies (2009,
Jossey-Bass): On the polygamist Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints,
by a woman who grew up there, broke away, and works against them.

Steven Johnson: The Invention of Air: A Story of Science,
Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (2008, Riverhead):
On Joseph Priestley, focusing more on his political interests in
emigrating to America and advising Thomas Jefferson than on his
notable work in chemistry.

Frank Levy/Richard J Murnane: The New Division of Labor: How
Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (paperback, 2005,
Princeton University Press): On the shifting shape of the job market,
driven largely by the increased use of computers, and what this means
for a generally ill-prepared workforce.

Andrew Lih: The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies
Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia (2009, Hyperion):
One of the major developments in world civilization in the last ten
years of so. Not quite the "greatest story ever told," but along
those lines.

William Lobdell: Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith
Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace
(2009, Harper Collins): Memoir, following the writer through the
maze of American religion, first as someone seeking help, then as
a journalist covering the beat, then finally as someone seeking
help. Seems like honest confusion, and modest enlightenment.

Cody Lundin: When All Hell Breaks Loose (paperback,
2007, Gibbs Smith): A survival guide of some sort, predicated on the
notion that our world is going to hell. Not sure whether it helps,
but most survival guides give you plenty of reason to try to never
have to use them.

G Calvin Mackenzie/Robert Weisbrot: The Liberal Hour:
Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s (2008,
Penguin Press): An overview history of the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations in the 1960s. I think this fills in a slot in
Penguin's multi-volume US history.

John McWhorter: All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save
Black America (2008, Gotham): Of course it can't, but with
plaudits from Shelby Steele and Stanley Crouch one might easily be
tempted to believe the opposite. McWhorter has written several books
on language which look interesting (e.g., Word on the Street:
Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English), and several
books on black culture and politics which don't (e.g., Doing
Our Own Thing: The Degeneration of Language and Music and Why We
Should, Like, Care).

Richard John Neuhaus: American Babylon: Notes of a Christian
Exile (2009, Basic Books): Catholic theologian, died earlier
this year. Had a strong hand in moving at least part of the Catholic
church into alignment with the Republican right. In particular, he
was often cited by Bush for his guidance on issues like stem-cell
research. Given that sort of insider connection, it seems a little
precious to describe himself as an exile.

Richard E Nisbett: Intelligence and How to Get It: Why
Schools and Cultures Count (2009, WW Norton): A nature/nurture
rehash, leaning strongly to the notion that good schools make all the
difference when it comes to IQ.

Karen Page/Andrew Dornenburg: The Flavor Bible: The
Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of
America's Most Imaginative Chefs (2008, Little Brown):
The idea here is to build up a map of what ingredients enhance
what flavors. Many, of course, are things that we already know
about from past experience, but one might learn something.

Gregory Alonso Pirio: The African Jihad: Bin Laden's
quest for the Horn of Africa (paperback, 2007, Red Sea
Press): An attempt to sort out the complex political machinations
in and near Somalia, especially the inevitable Jihad card, and
the shadowy connections with former-Sudan resident Bin Laden.

Charles Postel: The Populist Vision (2007; paperback,
2009, Oxford University Press): Big new history of the late 19th century
populist movement.

Guido Giacomo Preparata: Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and
America Made the Third Reich (paperback, 2005, Pluto Press):
I figure this argument is skewed and more than a little paranoid, but
wouldn't mind seeing some exposure of US and UK business interests
backing their German colleagues' support of Hitler. Multinational
business interests go back a long ways -- shared class interests
all the more so. Didn't work out so well in this case, which is why
it's illustrative even if not typical.

John Reader: Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent
(2009, Yale University Press): Domesticated in Peru some 8,000 years
ago, imported to Europe in the 1500s where it had a huge demographic
impact -- especially in Ireland and in Eastern Europe, which are by
now inconceivable without it.

Thomas C Reed/Danny B Stillman: The Nuclear Express: A
Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation (2009,
Zenith Press): Ambitious subject scope, probably a bit skimpy at
393 pages (cf. Richard Rhodes' three volumes, which still don't
cover a lot of the smaller proliferation cases). Authors are nuke
designers, which should add some technical interest.

Marcus Reeves: Somebody Scream!: Rap Music's Rise to Prominence
in the Aftershock of Black Power (paperback, 2009, Faber &
Faber): Historian, tries to link put draw out the context rap artists
work out of, from Grandmaster Flash to Jay-Z and Eminem.

Melissa Rossi: What Every American Should Know About the
Middle East (paperback, 2008, Plume): Author is Italian,
which evidently gives her a leg up on her readers -- she's done
several of these books: What Every American Should Know About
Who's Really Running the World, What Every American Should
Know About Europe, What Every American Should Know About
the Rest of the World, What Every American Should Know
About Who's Really Running America. Seems like I have one
of those, although I've never really looked through it. I have
a limited fascination with remedial education books, like the
old Cultural Literacy books -- not so much because I'm
likely to learn something as I find it interesting what other
people think you should know.

Michael Ruhlman: Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the
Craft of Everyday Cooking (2009, Scribner): Writer
turned chef still writing. I'm still waiting for his The
Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every
Kitchen to come out in paperback. This goes deeper into
one part of that: the ratios that work in recipes. Seems
like a useful idea. Wonder why it's not adequately covered
in the previous book.

Lisa Sanders: Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries
and the Art of Diagnosis (2009, Broadway): How doctors figure
out diagnoses, and perhaps more importantly, how they screw up, and
what happens when they do.

Peter Senge: The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and
Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World
(2008, Doubleday): Senge seems to be some kind of management guru --
a previous book is called The Fifth Discipline: The Art &
Practice of the Learning Organization. Has four co-authors here,
listed in much smaller type: Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur,
Sara Schley. Looks like a business primer, which means it looks like
sustainability is moving up from radical concept to something someone
can make money off of. That's kind of notable in its own right.

David Shippy/Mickie Phipps: The Race for a New Game Machine:
Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3
(2009, Citadel): Reminiscent of Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New
Machine, which doesn't bring the book up to snuff -- most of
the reviews I've seen aren't very promising. The technology itself
could be fascinating, but the game machine culture has pretty much
completely turned me off.

Alyn Shipton: A New History of Jazz (2nd revised
updated ed, paperback, 2008, Continuum): Big (804 pp) book on a
big subject, originally published 2001 (an even bigger 965 pp).
Original cover looks semi-familiar, but I don't see it anywhere
handy.

Lee Siegel: Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of
the Electronic Mob (2008, Spiegel & Grau): A lament on
how the internet affects culture and social life. Author has written
Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination and
Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; also some
novels.

Keith Cameron Smith: The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires
and the Middle Class (2007, Ballantine): Short self-help book,
10 points in 128 pages, presumably simple enough anyone can follow it.
Cheap if that's all it takes to rake in millions.

Neil de Grasse Tyson: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall
of America's Favorite Planet (2009, WW Norton): Astronomy
writer, has several previous books. This one surveys the late,
not-so-great ninth planet, its checkered history and controversy.
That Americans are exceptionally fond of it is curious, I suppose.

Steven T Wax: Kafka Comes to America: Fighting for Justice
in the War on Terror: A Public Defender's Inside Account
(2008, Other Press): Lawyer for several cases, including Brandon
Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer who was nabbed for the Madrid train
bombings based on a botched fingerprint analysis.

Peter S Wells: Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages
Reconsidered (2008, WW Norton): A revisionist argument
on how dark the Dark Ages were, based on archaeological data,
after dismissing contemporary accounts as Roman-biased.

Jenna Woginrich: Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures
of a Handmade Life (2008, Storey Publishing): A memoir of
attempting to lead a self-sufficient life: raising food, making
clothing, being satisifed with simplicity. A whole growing genre
here, like William Coperthwaite: A Handmade Life: In Search of
Simplicity.

James Wood: How Fiction Works (2008, Farrar Straus
and Giroux): I hardly ever read fiction -- used to average about
one book per year, but the only novel I've read post-2001 was Tom
Carson's Gilligan's Wake (just couldn't resist) -- but I
used to have a weakness for metafiction, ever since I discovered
how much more fun it was to read Leslie Fieldler on Nathaniel
Hawthorne than to read Hawthorne himself. This is getting some
hype.

Paperback reprints will wait until Part 2, which will have
more political books.

Looking Out for the Super-Rich

Matthew Yglesias: Fiscal Responsibility:
This post bummed me out as much as anything I've seen in recent weeks.
Even Yglesias, framing estate tax breaks as a fiscal responsibility
issue, misses the point. If people recognized the most basic point I
learned as a young child -- that America is a land where each person
can achieve according to their own efforts -- the necessity of high
estate taxes would be common sense. America was founded in revolt
against aristocracy, yet 233 years later politicians trip over each
other trying to feather the nests of the born-rich. After eight years
of a disastrous Republican president elected largely on his inherited
name you'd think that Democrats (if that's what you call Lincoln and
Bayh) would be especially alert to this. Of course, Bayh is a second
generation senator, a Democrat only because he was born one, like he
was born rich, dumb, and entitled. Yglesias gives us Paris Hilton as
his illustration of the born-rich, but that's too kind. She at least
has a sense of humor about her upbringing.

Music Week

Jazz Prospecting (CG #21, Part 8)

Enough here to dump out, although I hardly feel like it. Been in
a terrible mood, and it's affecting my writing. Actually listened to
a good deal more this past week, but moved nine more records to the
relisten shelf without writing down my first impressions.

Digital Primitives: Hum Crackle & Pop: (2007-09
[2009], Hopscotch): Trio: Cooper-Moore (vocal, banjo, twinger, diddley-bow,
mouth bow, flute), Assif Tsahar (tenor sax, bass clarinet), Chad Taylor
(drums, m'bira, percussion). Previous album together was called Digital
Primitives, so this is another band in the wake of an album. Acoustic
group, with Cooper-Moore's homemade instruments definitively a primitive
one. Early on Tsahar struck me as a guy who'd just screech when he ran
of ideas, but the only time that happens here is when it's the right
thing to do. I caught a couple of YouTube videos of Cooper-Moore, which
make me realize I should revise my view of him as a hermit. He's the
life of the party here, and Taylor rounds him out into a terrific
rhythm section. His one vocal is a bit trite, but he no doubt means
it as profound.
A-

Donny McCaslin: Declaration (2009, Sunnyside):
Tenor saxophonist, you know that. I've always been impressed by his
chops. He's one guy who can show up at a session and run away with
it. But his albums always left me lukewarm, at least until last
year's Recommended Tools, where he cut the complexity down
to a bare-bones trio and just blew: my review line was, "like he's
strayed from Chris Potter's footsteps to chase after Sonny Rollins."
Well, he's back to Potter-ville here (or Douglas-ton) with a
piano-guitar quintet -- Edward Simon, Ben Monder, Scott Colley,
Antonio Sanchez -- plus a brass choir on 5 of 8 songs. Fancy
postbop arranging, slinky harmonies, less emphasis on sheer
virtuosity. Sounded better the second play than the first, so
I'll keep it open.
[B+(**)]

George Colligan: Come Together (2008 [2009],
Sunnyside): Piano trio, one of the most consistently impressive
pianists of his generation (b. 1970), but I've yet to hear a full
record I really like -- admittedly, I missed a skein of
well-regarded albums on Steeplechase. Liner notes advise: "It
might take 2 listens to hear our lifetimes of musical development."
Having played this 5 or 6 times, I'm sure it takes more. I don't
have any complaints or insights. I do have a long-established pet
peeve against covering Beatles songs -- maybe I know them too
well as originals, or maybe they're just such protean rock they're
unjazzable -- but they nail the title tune about as well as I can
imagine.
B+(**)

Melissa Walker: In the Middle of It All (2009,
Sunnyside): Vocalist, b. 1964, graduated from Brown, fourth album
since 1997, after three on Enja. Standards, more or less: only
"Where or When" has been done a lot; title cut is from Arthur
Alexander, a soul singer who's basically a cult item; second
song comes from Peter Gabriel; the one that most struck me was
"Mr. Bojangles," drawn out nicely with her exaggerated loops.
Arranged by Clarence Penn and Christian McBride, with Adam
Rogers and Keith Ganz on guitar, Aaron Goldberg on piano and
(most significantly) Fender Rhodes, and most valuably Gregoire
Maret on harmonica.
B+(**)

Hemispheres: Crossroads (2008-09 [2009], Sunnyside):
Group led by percussionist Ian Dogole, who has one previous Hemispheres
album, one by Ian Dogole & Global Fusion, a couple under his own
name, some earlier work in a group called Ancient Future. AMG lists
him as New Age, which doesn't seem quite fair. Two solo pieces here --
one on kalimba, the other on hang -- are basic but intriguing. The
other pieces are fleshed out with Sheldon Brown and Paul McCandless
on various reeds/horns, Frank Martin on piano, and Bill Douglass on
bass. McCandless's presence suggests Oregon, but doubling up on the
wind instruments gives us something lusher, which is not necessarily
a good thing -- clarinet and English horn, piccolo and soprano sax,
like that. Final cut adds Hussein Massoudi tombak and vocals on a
Persian piece. For once the vocal helps concentrate and clarify.
Cover is a satellite image of Istanbul straddling the Bosphorus.
As good a place to start as any.
B+(*)

Jim Beard: Revolutions (2005-07 [2009], Sunnyside):
Full credit: With Vince Mendoza and the Metropole Orchestra. Three
cuts from a 2005 session, the other 7 from 2007. Former has 54
musician credits, latter 51, about half strings in each case, most
of the names strike me as Dutch. Keyboardist, b. 1960, fifth album
since 1990, the first a large group on CTI, Song of the Sun.
Substantial list of side credits, many on synthesizer, also as a
producer. Mostly bright, fanciful, the strings neatly tucked in,
the horns tame, a little extra percussion.
B+(*)

Jason Marsalis: Music Update (2009, ELM): Another
Marsalis brother, b. 1977, plays vibes. Third album, a quartet with
piano-bass-drums. Mostly light groove pieces, a couple of which
build up into something, most of which are pleasant enough.
B

Emily Jane White: Dark Undercoat (2008 [2009],
Important): Singer-songwriter, AMG considers her Rock and I
concur, not that she rocks very hard. Rather gloomy, in fact.
Also plays guitar and piano, with bass and drums for backing,
plus cello on one cut. Leaves a haunting effect; not sure of
its literary merit.
B+(**)

Rogério Bicudo/Sean Bergin: Mixing It (2008 [2009],
Pingo): Title is a misnomer: these duets don't really mix. Rather,
the ex-Brazilian guitarist and ex-South African saxophonist, both
now based in the Netherlands, play their own parts in each other's
presence. Imagine Stan Getz and Luiz Bonfa in the studio, playing
show and tell, trying to figure each other out, without the percussion
and all the other stuff that smooth things over. Of course, Bergin's
not as smooth as Getz, and Bicudo isn't as slick as Bonfa -- and when
he sings Jobim, he reminds me of Astrud Gilberto, affectless, only
clunkier, as males tend to be. Bergin's attempt to mix in a bit of
Abdullah Ibrahim does little to change the focus on Brazil. Still,
I find this charming.
B+(**)

Edward Simon Trio: Poesia (2008 [2009], CAM Jazz):
Pianist, from Venezuela, moved to New York 1989, 8th album since
1993. Piano trio with John Patitucci on bass (acoustic and electric),
Brian Blade on drums. Never impressed me much before, but I like his
repeating rhythmic riffing that drives most of these pieces. Seems
like fans of the late EST would get off on this.
B+(***)

John Abercrombie: Wait Till You See Her (2008
[2009], ECM): Guitarist, a steady producer since the early 1970s,
in a quartet with Mark Feldman (violin), Thomas Morgan (bass),
and Joey Baron (drums). Feldman, who's perhaps the least swinging
violinist in jazz, dominates the sound, so it takes some effort
to locate the guitar and note how neatly it fits in.
B+(**)

Dave Rivello Ensemble: Facing the Mirror (2002
[2009], Allora): Composer, conductor, teaches at Eastman School
of Music in Rochester, founded this 12-piece ensemble in 1993.
Studied under Bob Brookmeyer, who wrote the liner notes here.
Elaborate postbop shadings, impressive at first but turn out to
be of limited interest.
B

Sunday Papers

Picked up the newspapers this morning. The Wichita Eagle had
better things in it than the New York Times. First, Richard
Crowson's editorial cartoon:

The cartoon was also reinforced by a letter from Chris Darnell,
titled "What Choice?":

Your employer chooses a health insurance company. That insurance
company has a list of doctors you can use, but only those in
network. The insurance company tells your doctor what medicines are
best for you and won't pay for those outside their formulary. It may
even tell you which pharmacy you can use. The insurance company tells
you which hospital you can use. Where is all this choice you think you
will lose with President Obama's health care plan?

Are you afraid of rationing of health care? An estimated 45,000
people die each year for lack of medical coverage and health
care. That is rationing.

Are you afraid we will become a socialist nation if we have
affordable medical coverage available for everyone? The United Kingdom
has a national health service -- unlike what we are planning here --
and everyone knows the U.K. is not socialist.

It just can't be moral to allow people to suffer and die because
they can't afford health care. Health care for everyone is the right
thing to do.

They also have a long piece by Les Blumenthal of McClatchy,
Tanker
bid rhetoric heats up in Congress. This is the $35 billion
boondoggle contract to build new tankers for the Air Force, a
scam that was originally cooked up by Boeing to extend the life
of their obsolete 767 airliner assembly line, which has now
turned into a political tussle between Boeing and Northrup,
the latter the US front for Airbus. Kansas politicians have
always dutifully lined up behind Boeing and its promise of 500
(originally 1000) jobs for Wichita. (I mean, where else can
you get a jobs program for only $70 million per job, a feat
so awesome even Republicans get stimulated.) Each side has
their bought representatives -- Sen. Richard Shelby the most
vocal for Northrup, while Kansas Rep. Todd Tiahrt, a Boeing
employee until he was elected to Congress, is so obsessive
about Boeing tankers that Bush nicknamed him Tanker Todd. On
the other hand, Tiahrt's stock at Boeing seems to be dropping:
recently Boeing announced that if they get the contract they
may do the work somewhere else than in Wichita -- depends on
where they find the political clout to land the deal. In that
case the jobs payola for Wichita will probably turn out to be
negative: once the Air Force decomissions its aging KC-135
tankers (and even older B-52 bombers), there will be no reason
to keep Wichita's McConnell Air Force Base going. No one here
seems to grasp the jobs-value of keeping old planes flying
where the only skills to do that are here, versus buying a
bunch of unneeded new planes that can be built and serviced
somewhere else.

Still, nobody's asking the real question, which is why do
we need or want a new generation of tankers in the first place?
The main thing they do is make it easier to get involved in
foreign wars. You would think that a president who promised
to change the way we think about war would start by changing
the way he thinks about subsidizing the war machine.

Speaking of which, the New York Times has an op-ed by Defense
Secretary Robert Gates,
A
Better Missile Defense for a Safer Europe. The tanker deal is
small potatoes compared to missile defense, the grandaddy of all
war industry scams. It has been a bad idea ever since Melvin Laird
put it on the Republican agenda: insanely expensive, brazenly
aggressive, and flat-out unworkable. Obama could have killed it
off once and for all, but instead he merely scaled it back and
tried selling that as "smarter missile defense." Gates, who's
done his share over the years to keep it going, puts it this way:

The future of missile defense in Europe is secure. This reality is
contrary to what some critics have alleged about President Obama's
proposed shift in America's missile-defense plans on the continent --
and it is important to understand how and why.

He then goes on to hype the Iran threat, at a time when the usual
hawks are clamoring again for bombing Tehran. While many progressives
are elated that Obama cancelled installation of missiles and radars
in Poland and Czechoslovakia that Bush had planned for little purpose
other than to irritate Russia, I find Obama's relatively sane plan
disappointing. Strategic missile defense is one of the weakest pillars
of US defense posture, a clearcut case where one can explain that the
technology cannot and will not work, and that the only viable options
are non-military. In playing along with this game, Obama is missing
a prime opportunity to effect the sort of change he was elected for
promising. Plus c'est le même chose, jamais change.

Music Week

Music: Current count 15775 [15725] rated (+50), 754 [744] unrated (+10).
May be a record-high rated count. Also unusual is that the unrated count
rose despite the rated count. What happened was that I spent a lot of time
listening to previously unlisted records on Rhapsody -- Verve's Originals,
most of which barely top 30 minutes, most only getting one pass. As for
real CDs, I'm in kind of a rut, having difficulty making my mind up and
getting things written. Fluke week. I still need to do house things, and
with Laura in Boston I should hunker down on that.

Jazz Prospecting (CG #21, Part 7)

Not a lot to report this week, but enough to bother with a post.
Still trying to get some other things done, and still frustrated
in how little I'm accomplishing. A few records from Rhapsody this
time. They are mostly things I wanted to check out following the
Downbeat critics poll post. If anyone reads this, Mary
Halvorson is probably not doing herself a favor in not sending
me records. On the other hand, I'm just as happy not having to
find somewhere to store Christian Scott. So it goes. I expect
that prospecting will remain light for the next two weeks, then
I'll go into a crunch period and finish off a column that I have
something like 150% of my space already filled up.

One side project I should note is that I've been digging
through Verve's Originals reissue series, which is the successor
to their LP Reproductions -- i.e., reproduce original LP order
and artwork with no extras (maybe better sound), so many wind up
close to 30 minutes. I've identified 138 albums in the series.
I haven't seen the packaging yet -- too bad I live in a town
with no record stores, but almost all are on Rhapsody. First
one I noticed was Satchmo at Pasadena, which turns out
to be a small part of the utterly wonderful The California
Concerts 4-CD box. I thought I'd sample a few items I'd
previously missed and stuff them into Recycled Goods, but I've
wound up listening to most of them, even predictably bad pop
albums (although thus far I've only hit 2 of 8 Roy Ayers joints).
Some finds (all A-):

Louis Armstrong: Satchmo at Pasadena (1951)

Louis Armstrong: New Orleans Nights (1950-54)

Count Basie: Basie Land (1963)

Maynard Ferguson: Octet (1955)

Stan Getz: Dynasty (1971)

Keith Jarrett: Treasure Island (1974)

Antonio Carlos Jobim & Elis Regina: Elis & Tom (1974)

Hugh Masekela: Home Is Where the Music Is (1972)

Gerry Mulligan/Paul Desmond: Blues in Time (1957)

Grover Washington Jr.: Soul Box (1973)

The Ferguson and Washington were surprises -- I've been through
all of the other Washingtons and nothing else comes close. Not listed
are things I've long owned in previous editions, including nearly all
of Coltrane's Impulse catalog, Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins
(an all-time favorite), Gil Evans' Out of the Cool, Oliver Nelson's
The Blues and the Abstract Truth, the Oscar Peterson/Clark Terry
Trio + One, Gato Barbieri's first two chapters (which I know as
Latino America), Johnny Hodges' Used to Be Duke, Stan
Getz's Sweet Rain, Sonny Rollins' On Impulse. A full
report one of these days.

Dafnis Prieto Si o Si Quartet: Live at Jazz Standard NYC
(2009, Dafnison Music): Cuban drummer, has pretty much blown everyone
away since arriving in New York. There is a style of Afro-Cuban jazz
marked by extreme start-stop rhythmic shifts, overlaid by other time
shifts in dazzling complexity. Prieto does all that, and he's really
quite amazing. His quartet tries to scale those shifts up. They're a
bit less convincing, mostly because none of them can maneuver as fast
as Prieto. Peter Apfelbaum plays tenor sax, soprano sax, bass melodica;
Manuel Valera piano, keyboard, melodica; Charles Flores acoustic and
electric bass.
B+(**)

Art Pepper: The Art History Project (1950-82 [2009],
Widow's Taste, 3CD): Three discs, designated "Pure Art (1951-1960),"
"Hard Art (1960-1968)," and "Consummate Art (1972-1982)." The gaps
account for prison time, which would have been clearer had whoever
put this together been better at dates: the first disc actually goes
from a Stan Kenton cut in 1950 up to 1957. Another gap between 1960
and 1968 is buried in the prison-hardened second disc, and the third
doesn't actually get going until 1977. Still, the eras are roughly
correct. Aside from the Kenton, the first disc -- a best-of picked
from a string of superb albums -- has a bright, fresh, clean sound
with no extra lines or baggage, just virtuoso alto sax over impeccable
west coast rhythm. The later material is more weathered and less choice.
Most of the second disc comes from a previously unreleased set with
pianist Frank Strazzeri -- rough stuff, Pepper fiercely determined
to make up for lost time. The third disc adds a little angst to his
extensively documented final period -- cf. the 16-CD Galaxy box, the
9-CD Complete Village Vanguard Sessions, scattered more/less
legit live shots -- when everything he did seemed magical.
A-

Joe Morris Quartet: Today on Earth (2009, AUM
Fidelity): After several records on bass, Morris returns to his
main instrument, guitar. The net effect is that he competes for
lead time with alto saxophonist Jim Hobbs, each interesting in
his own right, but neither runs away with the show. That's a bit
of a letdown for Hobbs, who's made a big impression both with
Morris on bass and in his own group, the Fully Celebrated, with
Timo Shinko on bass, as he is here.
B+(***)

Darius Jones Trio: Man'ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful
Thing) (2009, AUM Fidelity): Alto saxophonist, based in
Brooklyn, has previously appeared with Tanakh and Little Women,
not sure in any capacity other than playing alto sax. Rounding
out the trio: Cooper-Moore (piano, diddley-bo) and Rakalam Bob
Moses (drums). This has been stuck indecisively in my box for
several days now, neither improving nor slipping, so I want to
move on. Good to hear Cooper-Moore play some piano these days,
but it's mostly buried under the sax, where it may not be the
best support.
[B+(***)]

Yaala Ballin: Travlin' Alone (2009, Smalls):
Singer, b. 1983, from Israel, based in New York, debut album.
Nice voice, soft curves wrapped around songs like "I Remember
You," "I Only Have Eyes for You," "The Gypsy." Good group,
including Ari Roland, Sacha Perry, and Chris Byars, who should
be on the short list for singers looking for saxophone support.
B+(**)

Stacy Dillard: One (2008 [2009], Smalls):
Saxophonist (mostly tenor, some soprano), from Michigan, 32
(presumably b. 1976 or 1977). Website lists 4 albums since 2006,
but this is the only one on a label I've heard of. Wrote all the
pieces. Quintet with fender rhodes, guitar, bass, and drums --
no one I recognize. Dillard gives a bravura performance, fierce
at high speeds, soulful when he slows down.
B+(***)

Led Bib: Sensible Shoes (2008 [2009], Cuneiform):
English group, led by drummer Mark Holub, with two saxophones (Pete
Grogan and Chris Williams, who wrote 2 of 9 pieces), keyboards (Toby
McLaren), and bass (Laran Donin). Third album since 2005, the previous
ones on Slam and Babel (English avant-garde labels with virtually no
US presence). It's tempting to slot this has a fusion group, mostly
because they're loud, sometimes melting down into chaos, but then
they'll throw you something that isn't. I've played this too many
times; doubt that I'll ever put it together.
B+(**)

Rez Abbasi: Things to Come (2008-09 [2009], Sunnyside):
Pakistani-American guitarist, did a record a few years back that I
liked quite a bit, Snake Charmer. Lately he's joined Rudresh
Mahanthappa's Indo-Pak Coalition, and here he expands that group to
include pianist Vijay Iyer. So this should be a major album, but I'm
not feeling it -- perhaps with all this talent I'm expecting something
with a strong South Asian vibe and that's missing. (Note that Dan
Weiss, who is a superb tabla player, is only credited with drums.)
I could take the easy way out and blame it on Kiran Ahluwalia's
vocals (4 of 8 tracks) -- I can think of many more cases where the
wife singing bogged down a record -- but I'm not sure that's it
either. Will keep it open, noting that the three principals have
strong solo spots, and that it's sounding better while typing this
than it did before I sat down.
[B+(*)]

These are some even quicker notes based on downloading or streaming
records. I don't have the packaging here, don't have the official hype,
often don't have much information to go on. I have a couple of extra
rules here: everything gets reviewed/graded in one shot (sometimes with
a second play), even when I'm still guessing on a grade; the records go
into my flush file (i.e., no Jazz CG entry, unless I make an exception
for an obvious dud). If/when I get an actual copy I'll reconsider the
record.

Dee Alexander: Wondrous Fascination (2006-07 [2007],
no label): She won Downbeat's Rising Star Female Vocalists poll,
so I figured I should check her out. This is the only thing Rhapsody
has: a pop gospel album with The Christ Community Worship Team. She's
not an over-the-top gospel diva -- her voice only barely emerges above
the crowd. Not a lick of jazz either. Sounds awful at first, but over
the course develops a humdrum routine catchiness. The record I still
want to find is Wild Is the Wind (Blujazz).
C- [Rhapsody]

Christian Scott: Live at Newport (2008, Concord,
CD+DVD): Cool young mainstream trumpet player, Downbeat's
Rising Star, has two previous albums on Concord, neither made much
of an impression on me. Sextet, with Walter Smith III on tenor,
both piano and guitar as well as bass and drums. This starts out
sounding funereal, and rarely picks up the place, although the
rhythm is competently complex and Smith cuts a few strong solos.
Can't see DVDs via Rhapsody, not that I'd want to.
B [Rhapsody]

Mary Halvorson/Jessica Pavone/Devin Hoff/Ches Smith: Calling
All Portraits (2008, Skycap): Starts on something of a false
note with a title scream, a feint toward punk or antifolk followed by
a hard left into something else. Halvorson's guitar has the least
presence here. Hoff's bass, on the other hand, is amped up to the
point where he's the evident leader, while Pavone's violin slices
through everything without the slightest hint of sweetness. Mostly
odd groove music with a lot of sharp edges. Hard to say what it all
means, but the bass and drums provide balance and diversity that the
duo lacks. Maybe humor too.
B+(***) [Rhapsody]

Mary Halvorson Trio: Dragon's Head (2008, Firehouse
12): Away from Jessica Pavone, this finally provides some sense of
what Halvorson's guitar sounds like, although the answer isn't simple.
Trio includes John Hebert on bass and Ches Smith on drums. As much
fun as Devin Hoff was on Calling All Portraits, Hebert is a
relief here, totally engaged in whatever's happening, as supportive
as a bassist can be. Halvorson does a number of interesting things
here, including some surprising heavy metal crunch, but mostly a
lot of poking and prodding, small figures that stay far clear from
ye olde bebop lines. This got a lot of poll votes last year. Seems
like it is the sort of record an artist can build a reputation on.
A- [Rhapsody]

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further
listening the first time around.

More Health Care Books

Some other books that I've noted in my
book prospecting notes
but (generally) haven't explored further. Listed alphabetically
by author. A couple go beyond the politics of health care to get
into the practice, but I usually drew the line short of there.
Some deal with suspicious public health issues, and some of those
are suspicious in their own right. Some push right-wing or status
quo-ist agendas, some ideologically (e.g., Cato Institute) but
most with a financial stake in their scheme. A small number of
more general political books are listed where they seem to be
especially relevant (e.g., Rahm Emanuel's The Plan), but
not many. I've skipped over most books published before 2001,
except when they seem to have historical value. There were a
rash of books that appeared during 1992-94 that are presumed
hopelessly dated. There was a slight uptick around 2004, and
again from 2006 on when it started to look like a Democrat
might be elected president in 2008 -- although more than a
few of those books were meant to ward off Republican agendas
like HSAs and CDHC.

I've added notes to some where I thought helpful, but have let
most explain themselves through their titles. Several books have
book page links. I've eliminated all of the superfluous titles
(mostly MD) on author names.

Shannon Brownlee: Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is
Making Us Sicker and Poorer (2007, Bloomsbury): On my shelf;
the idea that you can not only save money but also improve quality
by eliminating unnecessary treatments is attractive but may prove
to be hard to attain.

Howard Dean: Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare
Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American
and Make Our Jobs Safer (paperback, 2009, Chelsea Green): Or,
why Obama didn't offer the most visible Democratic MD in the country
a job.

Richard DeGrandpre: The Cult of Pharmacology: How America
Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture (2006, Duke
University Press)

Adam F Dorin: Jihad and American Medicine: Thinking Like a
Terrorist to Anticipate Attacks Via Our Health System (2007,
Greenwood): Lots of bad things that could happen; no reason to link
them to Jihad.

David Dranove: Code Red: An Economist Explains How to Revive
the Healthcare System Without Destroying It (2008, Princeton
University Press)

Fran Hawthorne: Inside the FDA: The Business and Politics
Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat (2005, Wiley)

David Healy: Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship
Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression (paperback,
2006, NYU Press)

David Hemenway: Private Guns, Public Health (paperback,
2006, University of Michigan Press)

Regina Herzlinger: Market-Driven Health Care: Who Wins, Who
Loses in the Transformation of America's Largest Service Industry
(paperback, 1999, Basic Books): Harvard Business School prof, sees
insurance as the problem for distorting prices; uses eyewear as an
example of how an effective market-driven system would work.

Harold S Luft: Total Cure: The Antidote to the Health
Care Crisis (2008, Harvard University Press): Pushes
something called "SecureChoice," which looks like single-payer
for big ticket items (e.g., hospital stays) with CDHC for small
change and a cut for the insurance companies for processing
checks.

Joanne Lynn: Sick To Death and Not Going to Take It
Anymore!: Reforming Health Care for the Last Years of Life
(2004, University of California Press)

Maggie Mahar: Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason
Health Care Costs So Much (2006, Collins): Looks like one
of the more systematic analyses; on my shelf.

Paul Starr: The Social Transformation of American Medicine:
The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry
(1983; paperback, 1984, Basic Books): Pulitzer Prize-winning history
of medical profession in US; although old, its conclusion about the
profit-driven corruption of the profession has only become more true;
I have a copy on the shelf.

Rosemary A Stevens/Charles E Rosenberg/Lawton R Burns, eds:
History and Health Policy in the United States: Putting the Past
Back In (paperback, 2006, Rutgers University Press)

Kip Sullivan: The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It
and How We'll Get Out of It (paperback, 2006, Author House)

Cass R Sunstein: The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's
Unfinished Revolution -- and Why We Need It More Than Ever
(2004; paperback, 2006, Basic Books): On legal issues surrounding
a right to universal health care.

Keith Syrett: Law, Legitimacy and the Rationing of Health
Care: A Contextual and Comparative Perspective (paperback,
2007, Cambridge University Press)

The more I look, the more such books I find, although many of
them seem outside the bounds of good taste or immediate relevance.
Selecting a short reading list is impossible. I have only read 3
of these (the Bradley and Hacker links, and the first Atul Gawande),
plus 7 of the 9 books I reported on yesterday (1 link was based
on a review, one more on an excerpt). And I have a few more books
on hand if/when I get time for them: Brownlee, Mahar, Starr, the
second Gawande, Groopman; and I have Kawachi/Kennedy and the first
Wilkinson on order. Reid's new book looks promising, and Rothman
is a historian I've long admired tackling an important subject.
Hardly makes me an expert, but it does suffice to cover much of
the story. It also helps that I've read quite a bit of the
background history and theory; also that I have more personal
experience that I really want to think about. I've been thinking
that health care would make a good subject for a case analysis
in my book on how to think about public policy. The exercise
of dredging up all these books makes me realize that there's
an even bigger gap here for a book that can triangulate between
the practice of health care, the business and politics around
it, the social and philosophical concerns of patients, and the
technology. Will have to think more about that.

Health Care Books

I overheard most of Obama's health care speech the other night.
I usually duck political speeches, but it came on during a break
in the music, and I wasn't much enjoying the music. Seems like he
made the basic case clearly, although he didn't go very deep, in
large part because he's not trying to fix very much. I heard one
peculiar round of boos, but didn't catch what occasioned it --
maybe that Rep. Joe Wilson flap. And I heard three or four more
boos, clearly coming from Laura in the TV room. I agree with her
that the only way to actually fix the system is to wring the
profit incentives out of it and to restore a professional ethic
of care giving, and that the first step should be to institute
single-payer insurance. Obama's credentials as a progressive and
for that matter his reputation as someone with a grip on reality
were tarnished by his eagerness to make light of single-payer.
He also came up short on two other key points: one is whether
government can run programs that serve the people, which is
really a key article of faith for anyone who professes belief
in democracy; the other is deficits question, where the right
answer is: we'll spend what we need to spend to provide everyone
with quality health care, and if that's more than is in the
current budget we'll raise taxes to cover it. But then, as I
said, Obama wasn't trying to fix very much. And if he manages
to make it possible for someone like me who can afford to buy
health insurance but can't find any insurance company willing
to sell me a policy, I at least will be pleased. On the other
hand, lots of other people will remain disappointed. One thing
for sure is that Obama won't be the last president to attempt
to reform the health care system. Even if he delivers what he's
promised, he'll leave plenty more to be done.

Over the last few weeks, I read three health care books I
found at the library. I've read more over the last few years,
and have more on tap. The books are:

Ezekiel J Emanuel: Healthcare, Guaranteed: A Simple, Secure Solution
for America (paperback, 2008, Public Affairs): The perscription
here is for a regulated private insurance system, allegedly because
people want choices, but then goes on to expect big changes in the
provider segment -- a much higher bar to reform than simply dropping
private insurers no one likes anyway. Emanuel is Rahm Emanuel's brother,
which may be one reason Obama leans in this direction, but even Emanuel
sees bigger problems and goes further to fix them than Obama does.

Jill Quadagno: One Nation Uninsured: Why the US Has No National Health
Insurance (2005, Oxford University Press). This is a good full
range history of political efforts to reform health insurance going back
to the progressive era before World War I. One consistent thread is how
business interests have played decisive roles each step along the way --
even Medicare was slanted in favor of special interests, and did much to
vastly increase growth in spending and costs. The reform section at the
end is weak, but the historical survey is essential.

Arnold S Relman: A Second Opinion: Rescuing America's Health Care
(2007, Public Affairs). Probably the best policy book I've seen. At
least Relman gets the essential contradiction between profit-seeking
and quality care. He favors both single-payer financing and a major
reorganization of medical care in favor of large, non-profit PGP groups.
The latter may seem like a radical idea, but there are several good
examples already established (e.g., Kaiser-Permanente) and they have
superior results for lower costs. One weakness is that he doesn't
get into pharmaceutical and technology companies.

Malcolm Gladwell: The Moral-Hazard Myth.
An article published in 2005, in part a review of the Uninsured in
America book cited above. When I originally posted a quote from
the article, I didn't bother tracking down the URL, but now I've found
the piece online. Part of the quote deserves reiteration (the only
thing that has dated it is that the costs are even more outrageous
now):

One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States
is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times
in the past century -- during the First World War, during the Depression,
during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the
nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years -- efforts have been
made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each
time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has
opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction.
Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost
two and half times the industrialized world's median of $2,193; the
extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What
does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per
capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than
people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital
less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less
satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other
countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western
average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are
lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth
percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more
high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than
in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries
have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland,
Japan, Austria, and Finland have more MRI machines per capita. Nor
is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than
a thousand dollars per capita per year -- or close to four hundred
billion dollars -- on health-care-related paperwork and administration,
whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars
per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized
world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of
billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million
people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost
ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect
of its economy -- a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment
they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were
five cents cheaper -- has loyally stuck with a health-care system that
leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.

I started assembling a list of miscellaneous books related to health
care policy issues, starting with my previous book prospecting blogs.
Wound up with a pretty long list, which probably needs a few more notes,
so I decided to hold it back. Tomorrow, maybe.

Wall of Shame

September 11 kind of snuck up on me unawares this year. That seems
like a good thing: after seven-plus years of Bush playing it up as
carte blanche for warmongering, it's finally succumbing to a decent
burial in history, where it will quickly be forgotten -- like almost
everything else in American history. I'm not necessarily in favor of
forgetting history, but it beats misremembering it for malign purposes,
which is about all there was to the official 9/11 legacy. No one at
the time was allowed to suggest that the US might have done something
to have provoked the attack. Susan Sontag was villified for as much as
suggesting that Bush's characterization of the attackers as "cowardly"
wasn't quite correct. Since then the US has used 9/11 to rationalize
war after war, resulting in thousands of muslims killed from Somalia
to Pakistan's frontier territories. So forgetting the initial pain
seems like a good first step toward dismantling the reign of terror
that the US subsequently instituted.

I was reminded of this recently in an odd passage from Tony Horwitz's
A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors,
Lost Colonists, and Other Adventures in Early America. His research
brought Horwitz to Santo Domingo, where he toured the Faro, a museum
and lighthouse built to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus's
New World discovery (pp. 82-83).

The Faro had been intended to honor not only Columbus, but also the
global network he helped create: a monument, its builders proclaimed,
to world peace. So Dominicans had set aside space -- immensities of
space -- for countries from around the world to put up national
displays, rather in the manner of an old-time world exposition.

The first room we'd visited was Spain's. Next was Japan's, which
displayed samurai armor and a picture of a golden pagoda. Most nations
followed this model, exhibiting proud emblems of their history and
culture. China: calligraphy and Ming vases. Russia: a samovar and a
set of Matryoshka nesting dolls. And so on through the continents
until we reached the Americas. Guatemala displayed a Mayan vase,
Ecuador a set of twenty-five-hundred-year-old bowls that Leopoldo said
were worth millions of dollars. As we toured room after room, I began
to wonder how my own country would present itself in this ersatz
United Nations.

We went through another door and there it was, spanning two
walls. On one hung a few small photographs of July 4 celebrations:
fireworks and flag waving. The otehr wall, much more prominent, was
covered in poster-sized blowups of newspaper front pages. All were
dated September 12, 2001, and bore images of the previous day's attack
on New York's Twin Towers.

"DAY OF TERROR," read the hugely enlarged headline from the New
Hampshire concord Monitor.

"HOW MANY DEAD?" (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette).

"OUT NATION SAW EVIL" (Raleigh News and Observer).

"WAR AT HOME" (Dallas Morning News).

No other items were displayed. Registering the shock on my face,
Leopoldo shook his head sympathetically. "I am so sorry," he
said. "You must think of it every day."

What I felt at that moment wasn't sorrow for the 9/11 victims, but
mortification. Tiny Ecuador gave precious pottery as a token of its
heritage. My nation, the hemisphere's richest, offered only this:
Share our fear and feel our pain. In a venue designed to promote
global amity and understanding, the United States chose to emphasize
how divided and troubled the world remained. It was a minor thing,
really, a display in a little-visited Dominican museum. But still, the
exhibit rankled: my own small wall of shame.

The "wall of shame" refers to a wall built to shield visitors
to the Faro from catching a glimpse of Santo Domingo's slums. But
the wall of 9/11 does something different. It exposes the demented
underside of the American psyche. It shows the world that we are
incapable of showing concern for anyone else. Only one other country
wears its scars so prominently on its sleeve, and that's Israel --
one of the things that binds the two countries together. But even
Israel softens their PR a bit, showing beaches and oranges along
with ancient ruins. Or so I'd guess. Horwitz doesn't mention an
Israeli exhibit at the Faro.

Smalls Consumer Guide

Opening the mail, I glanced at the hype sheet in one package, and
found myself reading a desperate cry for help. From Luke Kaven, at
Smalls Records:

September 2009 finds the label surviving, but just barely. The
state of the international jazz record market has reached a critical
state where we feel that independent jazz record labels can no longer
be run according to a traditional for-profit formula. New ideas, and
new sources of funding will have to be found in order to
survive. [ . . . ] The sad thing is that those of
us who perform the mundane tasks cannot afford to sacrifice any
further for the artistic well being of others, and that expenses are
likely to be passed back to the musician. Feel free to offer your
suggestions for how we might survive the next year.

Now, I'm in no position to audit Smalls Records or any other
label. I do know that the number of small labels like Smalls has
actually grown since the mid-1990s, as has the number of working
jazz musicians. I don't doubt that most are marginal as businesses,
fueled more by passion for the art than greed. At least some are
subsidized by other jobs. But when I look at the bottom line for
my little writing business, Kaven's letter strikes me as whiney.
Still, it's worth noting that the forty-some records Smalls has
released since 2004 include quite a few gems and only one dud I'm
aware of, and that most of these records would never have been
released but for the efforts of Kaven. The most obvious example
is Frank Hewitt, a pianist who died in 2002 with nothing under
his name. Kaven's released five albums of old Hewitt tapes, all
pretty good. He coaxed Teddy Charles back into the studio after a
50-year absence. He released a couple of records by a saxophonist
who immediately left New York for the greener pastures of Armenia.
Again, there are other labels doing the same sorts of things. If
Kaven has a handicap it's that he focuses on the subtlest details
of mainstream postbop, territory that most others have beat to
death. On the other hand, anyone with a taste for 1950s bebop,
which is still the mother lode of jazz (other claims from New
Orleans to Norway notwithstanding) will be comfortable here.

Anyhow, one thing I can do is to pull out the Jazz Consumer
Guide archive of Smalls Records. Since July 2004 Smalls has placed
five records in the A-section, including one pick hit (Chris Byars:
Photos in Black, White and Gray), plus two Honorable Mentions.
Below you'll find all of them plus a bit more: Zaid Nasser and Fat
Cat Big Band have two records each that didn't make my space cut
last time, so are planned for the next Jazz CG. I've also included
the "off list": records I've prospected but haven't yet reviewed
in Jazz Consumer Guide.

Omer Avital: The Ancient Art of Giving (Smalls)
The second installment in Avital's archives, Room to Grow,
starts to make the case for the Israeli bassist as a catalyst for
cutting edge postbop in the late '90s, but this is the album where
the payoff comes clear. His quintet is structured for hard bop,
but he lets the rhythm slosh around, and once they get warmed up,
Mark Turner's tenor sax and Avishai Cohen's trumpet, break loose.
A-

Chris Byars: Photos in Black, White and Gray
(Smalls)
Referencing Gigi Gryce's alto sax and Lucky Thompson's tenor,
Byars finds new niches in bebop, picking up threads from the
1950s that got pummeled by hard bop, discarded altogether by
the avant-garde, then buried under whatever passes for postbop
these days. Much as bebop developed underground in places like
Minton's where musicians gathered to play for each other, the
same dynamic developed at Smalls in the '90s, connecting a
new generation to unreconstructed veterans like Frank Hewitt
and through them to the foundations of modern jazz. Tapping
into the process, Byars sounds fresh even working in such a
well-worn form.
A-

Frank Hewitt: We Loved You (2001, Smalls)
Hewitt was one of countless guys who spent their lives playing in
obscure dives, never lucking or bulling into the spotlight. For nine
years up to his death in 2002 he worked and sometimes lived at Smalls,
an after-hours club in NYC, garnering fans like Luke Kaven, who
founded this label to right the wrong that Hewitt had never released a
record. It's easy enough to guess why biz pros passed: Their ideal
pianist is a young guy with a distinct edge -- a Brad Mehldau or a
Jason Moran. Hewitt sounds warm and comfy, like someone you'd cast for
atmosphere before cutting back to the plot. But because he never gets
corny or sentimental, he cuts himself a distinctive niche after
all.
A-

Frank Hewitt: Fresh From the Cooler (1996, Smalls)
A bebop pianist who almost slipped through 66 years of life without
leaving a trace, Hewitt built enough of a cult during his Smalls
residency to inspire a label in no small part dedicated to his
legacy. His fourth posthumous release features a trio that steps
gingerly around jazz standards such as "Cherokee" and "Monk's Mood"
-- nothing fancy, just a rare touch with for melodic nuance.
A-

Ari Hoenig: The Painter (Smalls)
Led by the drummer, but Guadeloupean Jacques Schwarz-Bart could write
a book on state-of-the-art tenor sax, and French pianist Jean-Michel
Pilc can dazzle even when he's dutifully helping out. Recorded live at
Fat Cat, it sneaks up on you, like the realization that you've just
had a real good time.
A-

Zaid Nasser: Escape From New York (Smalls)
An alto saxophonist who risks sounding like Charlie Parker
and winds up showing how it should be done. He taps Ellington
for two tunes, wails through "Chinatown My Chinatown," plucks
a barnburner from oldtime bebop pianist George Wallington,
strings them together with a couple of originals, including
one from pianist Sacha Perry. Not a tribute. More like 55th
Street is back in business.
A-

Honorable Mention

Ari Roland: And So I Lived in Old New York . . .
(Smalls)
The Chris Byars Quartet, bass-ackwards. [A-]

Zaid Nasser: Off Minor (Smalls)
Classical bebopper, smoother and slicker than Bird, not in
such a hurry. [A-]

Harry Whitaker: One Who Sees All Things (1981-82,
Smalls)
Avant-fusion, reverting to the true radicalism of bebop.
[B+(***)]

Fat Cat Big Band: Meditations on the War for Whose Great God
Is the Most High You Are God / Angels Praying for Freedom
(Smalls)
Two separate discs, crossing Ellington and Mingus for postbop
swing and back-to-the-future politics. [B+(**)]

Off List

These are other Smalls records I prospected and rated but didn't
write CG reviews of -- although a couple are still in play, and the
U items I haven't gotten to yet. This is pretty close to the
complete catalog (exceptions I'm aware of: Omer Klein: Heart Beats;
Neal Miner: Evening Sound; Sacha Perry: Eretik). Recording
dates provided. I just alphabetized them within grade slots, and didn't
try to figure out where the pre-star B+ items rank.

Negative Sum Game

The obvious point is that while income for the top 1% exploded after
1976, income was virtually flat not just for the poor but all the way
up to 90 percentile. Of course, we knew that, not that it's not worth
pointing out again and again. But two more things this shows clearly:
one is that during 1946-76 top 1% income growth was depressed relative
to lower income groups: the economy has a whole did better when the
rich were held back; the other is that the shift to a far richer top
1% was not a zero sum game: more income for the top 1% cost everyone
on average ("per capita national income") more than the rich gained.
I suppose you could propose other factors for the drop in per capita
national income between the two 30-year periods, but these results do
prove that government policies to promote the interests of the rich --
e.g., a massive reduction in income tax progressivism -- don't help
the economy as a whole, especially the vast majority of people. This
not only calls into question policies that benefit and promote the
rich. It suggests we should be doing the opposite, at least returning
to 1950s levels of progressive taxation, union membership, education
funding, etc. -- things that tip the balance of power back towards
the people who do the work.

Recycled Goods (65): August 2009

Music Week

Music: Current count 15725 [15687] rated (+38), 744 [745] unrated (-1).
The big rated count is almost all due to Rhapsody. Did virtually no Jazz
Prospecting this week. Thought a bit about Recycled Goods and got off on
a tangent exploring Verve Originals. Can't claim success in my effort to
get my non-music-writing life back on track.

Louis Armstrong and the All-Stars: Satchmo at Pasadena
(1951 [2009], Verve): Another LP reproduction series, old product on
the cheap with no enhancements; one complaint is that Satch spreads
center stage around too much, but Barney Bigard, Earl Hines, and Jack
Teagarden earn their keep and their billing, and the sketch with Velma
Middleton on "Baby It's Cold Outside" is an all-time classic; another
is that it ends too soon, which is why I much prefer the 4-CD version:
The California Concerts, sadly out of print.
A- [Rhapsody]

John Coltrane/Archie Shepp: New Thing at Newport
(1965 [2006], Impulse): Two separate sets, with Coltrane's Quartet
conflicted and sloppy on one 12:43 cut, Shepp both further out and
more authoritative with Bobby Hutcherson's vibes an interesting
contrast; previous CD releases had one more cut each, adding to
the contrast.
B+(**) [Rhapsody]

Budd Johnson: Ya! Ya! [The Definitive Black & Blue
Sessions] (1970 [2002], Black & Blue): An unsung hero,
the guy who taught Ben Webster to play tenor sax, on a swing
through France with Charlie Shavers on trumpet, pretty much as
underrated as Johnson, and some local unknowns on "Body and
Soul" and a batch of blues -- bread and butter, cheese and red
wine.
B+(**) [Rhapsody]

No Jazz Prospecting

Only bagged two records this week: not enough to bother you with.
Wish I could point to a lot of non-writing work balancing the scales.
Indeed, got a few things done, but didn't make much of a dent in the
big list of things to do. I figure I don't need to wrap up the next
Jazz Consumer Guide until the end of the month. While the incoming
mail is accumulating, it's still short of historic levels. Meanwhile,
I've been thinking about Recycled Goods, and wound up taking a side
trip through Verve's "Originals" reissue series, which will show up
sooner or later. I do have enough Recycled material piled up I should
stop hoarding it and resume posting. The planned relaunch has been
snagged up, and energy to move it forward seems wanting. Also have
a bunch of Rhapsody notes, which is a nice way to drift through the
doldrums.

Afghan Fatigue

Robert Dreyfuss: Afghanistan Apocalypse, and
Afghan Apocalypse, Part II:
Two reports on think tanks at work on how to save the Afghanistan
War, which isn't really the same thing as saving Afghanistan. The
first was held at Brookings with a panel full of well-known hawks
(Bruce Riedel, Michael O'Hanlon, Anthony Cordesman, and Kimberly
Kagan); the second at Heritage with less well-known hawks (Marvin
Weinbaum, David Barno, Lisa Curtis, and David Isby) -- evidently
it's hard to get jobs like this if you have any common sense.
Weinbaum talked at length about election fraud, but didn't see
that as reason to back off.

A key point of the Heritage Foundation presenters, including
Weinbaum, is that it is critical for the White House to shore up
declining political support for the war -- which is already opposed by
a majority of Americans, who've told pollsters the war isn't worth
fighting. So the White House is caught between two bad options: if it
continues to gloss over problems like the fraudulent election, it will
develop a Vietnam-like credibility gap as the truth becomes clear. But
if Obama tells the truth, an American public already soured on a
hopeless war against a vaguely defined enemy ten thousand miles away,
with rising US casualties and the prospect of spending hundreds of
billions of dollars, is very likely to decide that it's long past time
to get out.

Again:

General Barno, who commanded US forces in Afghanistan from
2003-2005, stressed in his presentation the importance of domestic US
propaganda for the war, saying that a key to the success of the US
enterprise in Afghanistan is to "rebuild popular support" for a
sustained US effort. [ . . . ] then Barno moved
dangerously close to the Republican right's line that anyone who
doesn't support the stay-the-quagmire policy is committing
treason. "The idea of an exit strategy," said Barno, "plays into the
hands of the Taliban strategy."

So, Obama can show his support for bipartisanship by adopting
Republican programs that wreck the government, provided he has the
courage and leadership to browbeat Democrats into towing the line.
Sen. Jim DeMint was wrong: health care won't be Obama's "Waterloo"
because failure there just shows how badly we need more Democrats;
Afghanistan will be, because it shows would-be Democrats that no
matter who they vote for, they'll get stuck in foreign wars where
nobody knows even what they're trying to do, and nobody has the
self-awareness, let alone the guts, to recognize when nothing they
do does anyone any good -- except, of course, for self-annointed
experts who get to lecture them on their failures and urge them
on to even greater failures.

David Swanson: Bush's Third Term?
Well, I wouldn't put it in those terms, but Swanson runs with his
concept further than I expected. The extent to which there's any
continuity from Bush to Obama should be embarrassing. I tend to not
get worked up over the torture, civil liberties, and constitution
mangling issues because I figure they've been endemic for 50-60
years now, a natural outgrowth of the perpetual warfare state. I
was struck, though, by the bit about the president refusing to
disclose secret meetings with industry moguls to fix a "reform"
bill that protects what are basically predatory industries.

There has been a lot of stuff floating by on Afghanistan lately,
including George Will's belated decision to opt out. The latest
poll I saw was 57% opposed to continuing doing whatever we're
doing over there. I think I saw that Cindy Sheehan is camping
out on Obama's vacation turf, and all I can say is "bless her."
I haven't been keeping links on all this, but the gist of it is
that we're having serious buyer's remorse over the whole system
we put in place, from Karzai on down. We're starting to see
analogies not just between Afghanistan and Vietnam and between
Karzai and Diem. That may suggest a coup, but there are plenty
of reasons to realize we'd be better off backing off. There
are also Obama-LBJ analogies, although with regard to the wars
Obama-Nixon would be more accurate. Maybe with the domestic
program too.